ing, I sat down and poured out to my sweetheart in a letter, which I fain would have recalled as soon as it was mailed, my angry resentment at what I termed being "double-crossed." I wrote unkindly, I wrote hysterically, I wrote intolerantly, I wrote pleadingly.
And, as always, my answer from him was characteristic. He wrote kindly, he wrote calmly, he wrote tolerantly, and he, too, wrote pleadingly.
And, as always, my subsequent letter to him was one of apology for a hasty temper indulged. I remember back in 1917, when I had shown anger for a moment over something, Mr. Harding wrote to me afterward, "I love you, Nan, darling, as much when you are angry as any other time." Indeed, I have never had anything but love displayed by him toward me.
And even in late years when my sister has intimated to me that "Mr. Harding was not as loyal to you, Nan, as you were to him, believe me!" I have recognized that whatever Mr. Harding said to my sister Elizabeth in that interview, he said not because he didn't love or trust me, but because, as he told me so often, he "couldn't be expected" to trust anybody beyond or outside of me, because he knew that in all the world nobody loved him as devotedly or as passionately as Nan Britton. And when he talked to Elizabeth, even though she was my own sister, he was talking to a comparative outsider.
And so there continued to be dissension in the Willits household whenever the mother of their adopted daughter appeared on the scene, and I continued to cast about in my mind for a plan which would make it possible for me to take my daughter. As the spring advanced, and I realized another summer was drawing near, I grew more panicky than ever. In June my school would be out and I knew Elizabeth and Scott intended to go down on the Illinois farm that summer as early possibly as
