Then, too, I found that Mr Revitts never wrote to Mary without, in a half-bashful way, showing me the letter.
“Lookye here,” he would say, “we said we’d help one another, lad. Some o’ these days you’ll want to write such a letter as this here, and so you may as well see how it’s done. Then you can just shove your pen through where the spellin’ ain’t quite square, and I’ll write it out again. I don’t know as it’s quite right to let her get thinking as I’m such a tip-topper at spellin’, but she came the same game with me over the writing, making me think as she’d improved wonderful, when it was you; so it’s six o’ one and half-a-dozen o’ t’other. What do you say?”
“I don’t think Mary meant to deceive you, Bill,” I said. “Poor girl, she had to work very hard, and her hands were not used to holding a pen. I don’t suppose she ever thought of saying who wrote for her. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in trying to improve your spelling.”
“No, there ain’t, is there, lad?”
“Nothing at all. Mr Hallett says we go on learning all our lives.”
“Hah! I suppose we do. What would you do then?”
“I should tell Mary I helped you.”
“So I will—so I will,” he said, in his quiet simple way; for as sure as the subject Mary was in question, all William Revitts’ sharp police-constable ways dropped off, and he was as simple and smiling as a child.
“Give my love to her, Bill,” I said.
He looked heavily and steadily at me for a few moments, and then in a very stupid way he began: