"I read the Watchman every week, and think it immense; but you fly above me, old man. I'm only a country scribbler, and must admire you a long way off. I takes off my hat to you, sir.
"The mater is rather queer just now, and I hope she isn't going to kipper. But one never can tell. 'Our times are in His hand,' that's Browning, isn't it? I saw it quoted the other day, and managed to drag it into a leaderette this week. Sounds well, I think.
"Pater joins in kind regards—at least, I suppose he does, though I haven't asked him—and Flo is sending her warmest breathings direct, I understand. —Believe me, ever thine,
"Edgar Winton."
Henry was inclined to resent the flippant tone of the letter, the senseless slang; but he remembered that it was "only Edgar's way," and stuffed the sheets back into their envelope and into his inside pocket. Flo's letter he turned over again as he lifted it and Dora's from his knee. He opened his sister's next, and laid the other down.
It was the usual Hampton budget of uninteresting details about the doings of that little community, and Henry read it in his usual perfunctory way, scarce recollecting the people whose names were recalled by it. "Who on earth is old Gatepost? I believe she means old John Crew, the farm bailiff. I'm surprised he is only dying now. Thought he would have been dead long ago." Often his thoughts would run thus over some bit of news from Dora. She seemed to write from out the past.
"Hoping you are well, as we all are when this leaves. No more at present, from your loving Sis."
The phrase might have been stereotyped; it was Dora's one form of "drawing to a close." Indeed, she did not draw thither; she simply closed according to formula when she had spun her loose threads of news into some semblance of a web of words.
Dora's letter was presently keeping Edgar's company, with many another tattered envelope and note, in Henry's pocket.
He turned to the third of the letters with no apparent zest.