Now, as Mary Grey could not venture to return to Blue Cliffs, or even to write a letter to that place with her own hand, so long as Mrs. Fanning should live in the house, the prospect of her doing either grew more and more remote.
She could not plead her sprained finger forever as an excuse for not writing; so one day she put on a very tight glove and buttoned it over her wrist, and then took a harder steel pen than she had ever used before, and she sat down and wrote a few lines by way of experiment. It was perfectly successful. Between the tight-fitting glove and the hard steel pen her handwriting was so disguised that she herself would never have known it, nor could any expert ever have detected it. So there was no possible danger of any one at Blue Cliffs recognizing it as hers.
Then, with this tightly-gloved hand and this hard steel pen, she sat down and wrote a letter to Emma Cavendish, saying that she could no longer deny herself the pleasure of writing to her darling, though her finger was still so stiff that she wrote with great difficulty, as might be seen in the cramped and awkward letters, "all looking as if they had epileptic fits," she jestingly added.
When Miss Cavendish replied to this letter she said that indeed Mrs. Grey's hand must have been very severely sprained, and that she herself would never have known the writing.
After this all Mrs. Grey's letters to Miss Cavendish were written by a hand buttoned up in a tight glove, and with a hard steel pen, and continued to be stiff and unrecognizable.
And in all Emma's answers there was surprise and regret expressed for the long-continued lameness of Mary Grey's right hand.
One day Emma communicated a piece of neighborhood gossip that quite startled Mary Grey.
"You will be sorry to hear," she wrote, "that our excellent pastor, Dr. Goodwin, has had a paralytic stroke that disables him from preaching. The Rev. Mr. Lyle, formerly of Richmond, is filling the pulpit."
Mary Grey was very much interested in this piece of news, that her own old admirer should be even temporarily located so near Blue Cliffs, with the possibility of his being permanently settled there.
She had not heard from this devoted clerical lover once since she had left Mount Ascension. She did not understand his sudden withdrawal, and she had often, with much mental disquietude, associated his unexpected estrangement with her own unceremonious dismissal from her situation as drawing-mistress at that academy.