u were threatened with pneumonia; your communication
of to-day you devote to proving that Hector Malot is a
carpenter. I agree with you with reservations, but the
sequence worries me. In the meantime have you had the
pneumonia?"

Her own letters were long and gossiping, full of the
scent of the heather and the eccentricities of Donald
Macleod; and she wrote them, regularly twice a week,
using rainy afternoons for the purpose and every inch of
the paper at her disposal. Elfrida put a very few of
them into the wooden box, just as she would have embalmed,
if she could, a very few of the half-hours they had spent
together.

CHAPTER XXI.

John Kendal had turned the key upon his dusty work-room
in Bryanston Street among the first of those who, according
to the papers, depopulated London in July. He had an old
engagement to keep, which took him, with Carew of the
_Dial_ and Limley of the Civil Service, to explore and
fish in the Norwegian fjords. The project matured suddenly,
and he left town without seeing anybody--a necessity
which disturbed him a number of times on the voyage. He
wrote a hasty line to Janet, returning a borrowed book,
and sent a trivial message to Elfrida, whom he knew to
be spending a few days in Kensington Square at the time.
Janet delivered it with an intensity of quiet pleasure
which she showed extraordinary skill in concealing. "May
I ask you to say to Miss Bell--" seemed to her to be
eloquent of many things. She looked at Elfrida with
inquiry, in spite of herself, when she gave the message,
but Elfrida received it with a nod and a smile of perfect
indifference. "It is because she does not care--does not
care _an iota_," Janet told herself; and all that day it
seemed to her that Elfrida's personality was inexhaustibly
delightful.

Afterward, however, one or two letters found their way
into the sandal-wood box, bearing the Norwegian postmark.
They came seldomer than Elfrida expected. "_Enfin!_" she
said when the first arrived, and she felt her pulse beat
a little faster as she opened it. She read it eagerly,
with serious lips, thinking how fine he was, and with
what exquisite force he brought himself to her as he
wrote. "I must be a very exceptional person," she said
in her reverie afterward, "to have such things written
to me. I must--I _must!_" Then as she put the letter away
she reflected that she couldn't amuse herself with Kendal
without treachery to their artistic relationship;