Then he added, 'There's only him and me--and mother. Father was
killed last year.'
'Do you know where he is?'
'No, Miss. But Mr. Desmond told me when he was here he might perhaps
see him. 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. She lived at the outbreak of
war with her father and mother. Her brother had been killed at
Passchendaele, and Mary's interest in life had vanished with him.
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