In the hall she met Marcia.
“Is your letter ready?” she said. “I am just going to the post. I’ll post it for you.”
“When do you think it will get to Dewsbury?” asked Pen, raising an anxious face.
“Oh, that’s no way off; it will get there to-night.”
“Thank you, so very, very much.”
“Good-bye, dear,” said Marcia. “I don’t seem to know you as well as the others.”
“Good-bye. I’m ever so grateful,” said Pen.
She wrung Marcia’s hand.
“How nice she is. How kind she is—not a bit like the others,” thought the child.
Marcia, as she dropped the letter into the post, glanced at the address. She smiled a little and then forgot all about it. Penelope went home in a far happier state of mind. Surely there was deliverance at hand. Jim, if he could not come back, and she did not expect him even for her sake, to leave such wonderfully grand people as the Holroyds, would at least write a long, explanatory letter to his father.