med, the mere sight of the hand-of-write would
have cheered me.

Henceforward I could only learn, as it were, by ricochet what was going
on. My grandmother never set pen to paper. Her tongue to guide was
trouble enough to her without setting down words on paper to rise up in
judgment against her. True, my father wrote regularly to inquire if my
professor had any new light on the high things of Plato, the Iberian
flavour in Martial's Epigrams, and such like subjects which were better
fitted to interest a learned dominie who had lost the scholar of his
choice than to comfort a young fellow who has only lost his sweetheart.

For her part Agnes Anne wrote me reams about Charlotte, but never
mentioned a word as to the Maitlands, though she did say that Charlotte
was a good deal at Heathknowes, and (a trifle spitefully, perhaps) that
she did not know what took her there unless it were to see Uncle Rob!
This poor Uncle Rob of ours--his reputation was in everybody's mouth,
certainly. He had been, so they said, a runagate, a night-raker, and in
the days of his youth a trifle wild. But now with the shadows of forty
deepening upon him, it was not fair that all the hot blood of his teens
and twenties should rise up in judgment against him. Still so it was.
And the reason of it was, he had not, as he ought, married and settled.
For which sin of omission, as the gossips of Eden Valley said, "there
was bound to be a reason!"

Charlotte herself did not send a line, excepting always the letters I
was to forward to Tom Gallaberry at his farm of Ewebuchts on the Water
of Ae. This at the time I judged unkind, but afterwards I found that
Cousin Tom had insisted upon it, on the threat of going to her father
and telling him the whole affair. For, in spite of all, Cousin Thomas
was jealous--as most country lads are of college-bred youths, and he
pinned Charlotte carefully down in her correspondence. However, I made
him pay his own postages, which was a comfort, and as Agnes Anne and
often my father would slip their letters into the same packet, after all
I had only the extra weight to pay.

Still, I did think that some of them might have told me something of
Irma. But none did, till one great day I got a letter--from whom think
you? I give you fifty guesses--well, from my Aunt Jen. And it contained
more than all the rest put together, though all unconsciously, and
telling me things that I might have gone a long time ignorant of--if she
had