Angeles, and had not been mailed because it had been mislaid in a box containing part of the diary. That it had been written years before was proved by the three-cent stamp it bore, that denomination having been out of use for several years. This incident proves that Opal was for some purpose poring over the diary in Los Angeles. Was she embellishing it with the foster-parent age fantasy and the acrostics?
Another mysterious letter, bearing the telltale three cent stamp, contained pictures that purported to be of Opal's real father, of her real grandfather and of her real uncle. I was unable to find pictures of the d'Orleans family with which to compare them, but an expert, not knowing the history of the pictures, said that the one of the grandfather and the one of Opal were undoubtedly of persons of the same family. I have no doubt Opal contrived the mailing of these, but if they had been what they purported to be she certainly wouldn't have parted with them to send on a strange journey to me. Anyone else, wishing to aid Opal, certainly would have sent them to her instead of to me.
With all these plans so well laid long before the jaunt of Opal to Massachusetts' center of culture, I have often wondered what plans she had made to give the diary to the public. And then how Ellery Sedgwick should accidentally ask for this diary.
Yet this diary of childish romance and of an impossible foster-parentage fantasy was not all hoax and plagiarism, for it contains intimate details of things known to have happened at the time Opal was a child—the births of children who have been identified, a girl burned to death, a suicide, visits of various per-
