Miss Vavasor continued the most pleasant and unexacting of guests. She found the company of the major agreeable for her nephew’s sake. Mr. Raymount would not leave what he counted his work for any goddess in creation. Hester had inherited her fixedness of purpose through him, and its direction through her mother. But it was good he did not give Miss Vavasor much of his company. If they had been alone together for a quarter of an hour discussing almost anything imaginable, they would have parted sworn foes. So the major, instead of putting a stop to the unworthy alliance, found himself actually furthering the affair, doing his part with the lady on whom the success of the enemy depended. He was still now and then tempted to break through his self-imposed shell of restraint, yet he remained a man of honour and behaved like one.

After almost two weeks, Miss Vavasor took her leave for a round of visits, and Lord Gartley went back to town, with intention thereafter to pay a visit to his property, such as it was. He would return to Yrndale in three or four weeks, when the final arrangements for the marriage would be made.

A correspondence naturally commenced and Hester received his first letter joyfully. But the letter was nothing like the man’s presence. There was no life in it. With Hester in person, she suggesting and leading, his talk seemed to indicate the presence of what she would have in him. But alone with his own thoughts, without the stimulus of her presence or the sense of her moral atmosphere, the best things he could write were poor enough. They had no bones in them, and no other fire than that which the thought of Hester’s loveliness could supply. So his letters were disappointing. Had they been those of a person indifferent to her, she would have thrown them down, called them stupid, and thought no more of them.

But all would be well, she said to herself, when they met again. It was her absence that oppressed him, poor fellow! He was out of spirits, and could not write! He did not possess the faculty for writing that some had! Her father had told her of men that were excellent talkers, but set them down pen in hand and not a thought would come! Was not the presence of a man’s own kind the best inspirer of his speech? It was his loving human nature—she would have persuaded herself, but never quite succeeded—that made utterance in a letter impossible to him.