“‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’m going to write for the mignonette.’
“I headed my letter, ‘Ephesus,’ an address which always gave me satisfaction; not that I often had an opportunity of writing it.
“‘My Dear Ruth,—I am writing to you from a hill-side in Turkey to ask you if you will send me some seeds of mignonette for my garden; it is very easy to grow, and I think would do well in this soil. You would laugh if you could see my house, it is not like anything you have ever seen before. Please send me the mignonette soon, and a line with it to tell me if you are well.’
“I addressed it, ‘Mrs. Rawdon Westmacott, Vale Farm, Weald, Kent, England,’ and there it lay on my table grinning and mocking at me, knowing that it would presently cross the threshold I was dying to cross, and be taken in the hands I was dying to hold again.
“‘Done?’ said MacPherson. ‘Where have you ordered the seeds from? Carter’s?’
“‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve asked a friend for them,’ and some odd impulse made me show him the address on the envelope.
“He read it, nodded, and said nothing. I was disappointed, though really I don’t know what I should have answered had he questioned me.
“After that my days were filled with one constant thought. I calculated the nearest date, and then coaxed myself into the belief that there would be a delay after that date had come and gone; a long delay; perhaps a month. So many things might happen, Ruth might not be able to get the seed, she might put off writing, she might simply send the seed with no covering letter at all. This last thought was unendurable. It grew, too, in my mind: people of Ruth’s upbringing and education didn’t like writing letters, they didn’t like perpetuating their opinions so irrevocably as ink on paper perpetuated them, and anyway they always had a conviction that the letter once written, would not arrive, especially at an unheard-of-place like Ephesus. It was difficult enough to imagine the safe transit of a letter from one English county to another, but that a letter posted in the Weald of Kent should arrive in due course at a place out of the Bible was unthinkable.... I became daily more persuaded that she would not write, and daily my gloom deepened. MacPherson noticed it.
“‘Feel ill?’ he asked.
“‘No, thanks,’ I said, annoyed.