Leave Her to Heaven Read Online Free PDF

an unconventional happy ending.
    The first publisher to whom he showed the manuscript accepted it. Harland had a youthful gift for irony, and a dangerous facility at pillorying human follies and frailties. Since the critics, reviewing too many pedestrian volumes, are always eager to welcome a first novel which shows promise, his book won an enthusiastic though limited audience.
    Its mild success permitted Harland to resign from the Transcript and begin another. Before this was finished, his mother died. He and she had never been congenial; but her sudden death made him forget her faults and remember her virtues, and it
left in him an unaccustomed sense of loneliness. One result was that although Danny was at the time only ten years old, Harland turned to him hungrily. Danny had always, in a shy, boyish fashion, worshipped his big brother, and he welcomed this offered comradeship. Thereafter, except when Danny was at school and Harland at his desk, they were as often as possible together.
    Harland’s second novel was an improvement on the first; he finished his third in June, before he and Danny went to Anticosti. Published in October, the book quickly sold into six figures; and at once hundreds of women who had enjoyed the novel were eager to see him ‘in the flesh’ at luncheons and dinners and club meetings. Upon the assumption that anyone who can put words on paper can also speak amusingly, he was besought to lecture not only in Boston but elsewhere; and these flattering seductions consumed that winter so much of his time that he saw less than usual of Danny. When in April the boy contracted infantile paralysis, Harland blamed himself, thinking that but for some omission on his part, Danny would not have been thus stricken.
    Danny’s illness seemed at first likely to be fatal; and though he survived, his legs were left almost useless. As soon was he could safely travel, Harland took him to Georgia for treatment. Thus they were at Warm Springs when Glen Robie’s letter reminded them of that invitation to New Mexico.
    Harland had at first no thought of going, but Danny said at once that he must do so. ‘My gosh,’ he cried. ‘That’s the only thing that will make up to me for not going myself! You can come back and tell me all about it, and it will be almost as much fun as if I were along.’ And with that wisdom which is sometimes given to the young and afflicted, seeking an argument which Harland would accept, he urged: ‘Besides, Dick, we’re getting a little stale on each other! We’re all talked out. You’ll come back with so many things to tell me that we’ll never run out of talk again.’
    Harland yielded not too reluctantly. The thought of fine sunned days in the saddle and of streams alive with trout evoked
in him a hungry longing. He wrote Robie his acceptance, explaining why Danny could not come. He went by way of Boston to pick up a pet rod and some other needed gear, and when he departed, Danny gave him a cheerful farewell.
    â€˜Keep a diary, Dick,’ the youngster insisted. ‘Put everything in it, and I’ll ask a lot of questions too. Lin said there are wild turkeys on the ranch. Shoot one for me, and catch a lot of trout, and tell me all about everything when you come back. Good-bye! Good-bye! Good-bye!’ The clear, happy boyish tones rang in Harland’s memory as he drove away.
    â€“ II –
    Harland’s train left Chicago late in the evening. After breakfast next morning, with a book under his arm, he sought the observation car; but he sat down at the desk at the forward end of the car to write a long letter to Danny. His scrawl was rendered at times almost illegible by the motion of the train; and he made a joke of this illegibility, converting an occasional erratic pen stroke into a little sketch — an absurd face, an animal of no recognizable species, a flower — smiling as he imagined Danny’s hilarious