And I had a letter from Mr.Desmond ten days ago.

He'd come across Bob, and he wrote me a letter.' And out of his pocket he pulled a grimy envelope, and put it into Elizabeth's hands.
'Do you want me to read it, Jim ?' 'Please, Miss.' But she was hardly able to read the letters for the dimness in her eyes.

Just a boyish letter--from a boy to a boy.

But it had in it, quite unconsciously, the sacred touch that 'makes us men.' A little later she was in the village, where a woman she knew--one Mary Wilson--was dying, a woman who had been used to come up to do charing work at the Hall, before the last illness of a bed-ridden father kept her at home.

Mary was still under fifty, plain, clumsy, and the hardest worker in the village.