November 2, 1881.
I have just succeeded in having my communications, which were cut for a while, restored, and have received your letter of Friday night. In writing me please always acknowledge receipt of my letters by their date. I have quite recovered. My illness did me good, and I have a first-rate appetite.
You must not mind reports about my health. In fact, our "plots" have been completely disarranged by the necessity of writing and wiring my Queenie that there is nothing the matter with me.
I hope to be able to arrange to see you as soon as I hear that W. is firmly fixed.
I look at my beautiful Queen's face every night before I go to bed and long for the time when I may be with you again. Only for that I should be happier here than anywhere else.
November 5, 1881.
MY DARLING WIFIE,—When I received your dear letter to-day I had just time to send you a few hasty lines in acknowledgment; now when everything is quiet and with your own sweet face before me I can give my thoughts up entirely to my Queen, and talk to you almost as well as if you were in my arms. It seems to me a long, long time since our hasty good-bye, although the first three weeks of my present life—which term will have been completed to-morrow morning—has seemed only a moment. I often feel very sad when I think of poor, unhappy Katie waiting for her husband who does not come any longer as he used to come, but who will come again to her and will not again leave her.
I am trying to make arrangements that my own Queenie may come to me this time. I shall ask my ruler here if I may see my cousin, "Mrs. Bligh, who is coming from England to see me," in his office, and with only himself present. After all, darling, the only way in which I could have escaped being here would have been by going to America, and then I could not have seen you at all, and I know I should not have been so happy or so comfortable in America as here, and, besides, I should have been beset by so many dangers there.
I admire supremely my life of ease, laziness, absence of care and responsibility here. My only trouble is about your health and happiness and this has been my only trouble from the first. Queenie, then, will see that she also must try not to be so unhappy, especially as her husband's love is becoming stronger and more intense every hour and every day.
You will be anxious to know what my short illness was about. It was of a very unromantic kind—not the heart, but the stomach. I had not much appetite for some days, and was tempted by a turkey to eat too much, thence very severe indigestion and considerable pain for about an hour. However "our doctor," by means of mustard and chlorodyne, got me all right again, and my appetite is now as good as ever. In fact, I have gotten over very quickly the "mal du prison" which comes on everybody sooner or later more or less severely.