“Not for a long while, I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Marley. “Not until some one can be with him.”
Lavinia blushed, and before she knew it Mrs. Marley had bent over and kissed her cheek.
“He has a long hard battle before him, my dear,” she said, “in a great cruel city. We must help him all we can.”
Lavinia hesitated a moment, then she put her arms about Mrs. Marley and drew her down for the kiss which sealed their friendship.
They sat and talked of Marley for a long time, and at last when Lavinia rose to go, she held out to Mrs. Marley the letter her son had written her. She looked at it a moment before handing it to Mrs. Marley.
“Would you like to keep it?” Mrs. Marley asked.
“May I?”
“If you wish. But you must come often; I shall be lonely now, you know, and you must bring his letters and read parts of them. He’ll be writing so many more to you than he will to me.”
Lavinia received a letter from Marley every day; it was not long before Clemmons, the postman, smiled significantly when, each morning at the sound of his whistle, she ran to meet him at the door. And Lavinia wrote to Marley as regularly herself, sitting at the little desk in her room every night long after the house was dark and still.
The judge could find no hope in the observations Mrs. Blair reported to him.