"Oh, just one of your nice funny letters like you write to me."
"Quite like that?" said Jeremy earnestly.
"Well, not quite like that," smiled Mrs. Jeremy; "but you know what I mean. He'd love it."
"Very well," said Jeremy, "we'll see what we can do."
He withdrew to his library and got to work.
"My dear Mr. Mackinnon," he wrote, "the weather here is perfectly beastly."
He looked at it thoughtfully and then put it on one side. "We won't destroy it," he said to himself, "because we may have to come back to it, but at present we don't like it."
He began another sheet of paper.
"My dear Mackinnon, who do you think it is? Your old friend Jeremy Smith!"
He murmured it to himself three or four times, crossed out "old" and put "new," and then placed this sheet on the top of the other.