How delightful that the letter should come when she was alone! Now she could get the very maximum of enjoyment out of it. She stalked it stealthily, lest it should "vanish into thin air" before her eyes, took hold of it gingerly, examined the post-mark, smelt the faint perfume which, more than anything else, reminded her of the beautiful gracious woman in the rooms at Gloucester Place, and then opened the envelope carefully with her penknife.
She took out the contents, and arranged her three treasures on the table. Yes, there were three. They had all written. There was Sir Douglas's "My dear girl"; Lady Munro's "My darling Mona"; and Evelyn's "My very own dearest friend."
They were not clever letters at all, but they were affectionate and characteristic; and Mona laughed and cried over them, as she sat curled up in the corner of the stiff unyielding sofa. Sir Douglas was bluff and fatherly, and to the point. Lady Munro underlined every word that she would have emphasised in speaking. "Douglas was so dull and so cross after we parted from you. In fact even now he is constantly talking of you—constantly." Evelyn gave a detailed circumstantial account of all they had done since Mona had left them,—an account interspersed with many protestations of affection. "Mother and I start for Cannes almost immediately," she wrote. "Of course Father cannot be induced to leave Scotland as long as there is a bird on the moors. Write me long letters as often as ever you can. You do write such lovely letters." All three reminded Mona repeatedly of her promise to spend the whole of next summer with them somewhere.
"How good they are!" Mona kept repeating. "How good they are!"
When Mona was young, like every well-conducted school-girl, she had formed passionate attachments, and had nearly broken her heart when "eternal friendships" failed. "I will expect no friendship, no constancy in life," she had said. "I will remember that here I have no continuing city—even in the hearts of the people I love. I will hold life and love with a loose grasp."
And even now, when increasing years were making her more healthily human, true friendship and constancy had invariably called out a feeling of glad surprise. At every turn the world was proving kinder to her than she had dared to hope.
She was still deep in the letters when her cousin came home.
"Well," said Rachel, "I've just heard a queer thing. You know the work I had last week, teaching Mrs Robertson the stitch for that tidy? Well, she had some friends in to tea last night, and she never asked me! Did you ever hear the like of that? She thinks she's just going to get her use out of me!"
"I expect, dear," said Mona, "that the stitch proved more than she could manage after all, and she was afraid to confess it."
"Well, I never did know any one so slow at the crochet," said Rachel resentfully, releasing the wonderful red cap from its basket. "She may look for some other body to help her the next time. But we'd better take our porridge and be off to our beds, if we're going to St Rules to-morrow."