he missive in Lucy’s hand was no simple workman’s clumsy bill. It was a sheet of blank paper.
“What can this mean?” said Lucy, turning it about, while Miss Latimer and Tom watched her.
“You may be sure it ought to be the bricklayer’s bill, but that he has put in the wrong piece of paper,” observed Miss Latimer.
“Or it may have come from that stupid fellow we found in the area,” said Tom. “Perhaps his next tipsy fit has taken this form, and he is under the delusion that he has written a letter to Jane Smith.”
“That is not unlikely,” Lucy admitted, still turning the paper about. “The letter has been posted at this district office, and there is no maker’s name on the envelope. Anyhow, there it goes,” and she tore it in two and dropped it into the waste-paper basket.
“I wonder if Clementina would notice the strange-looking letter,” said Miss Latimer. “I’m always afraid of something stirring her superstitions and making her take flight to her Highland hills on the score that ‘Babylon’ is too terrible a place to stay in.”
That was all. It was but a nine minutes’ wonder. Yet they remembered it afterwards.
Early in December there came a letter from Mrs. Grant in Peterhead. Lucy and the captain’s wife had kept up a slight correspondence during their husbands’ absence on the Slains Castle. Each had always written to apprise the other of any news she had received. Once or twice, indeed, when unexpected opportunities for ship’s letters had arisen, the busy captain had contented himself with sending a message to his wife viâ his passenger’s home epistle. Mrs. Grant had always promptly and cordially acknowledged these curtesies on Lucy’s part. But she was not naturally a letter-writing woman. Her missives were always of the briefest, and never until now had she taken the initiative.
Mrs. Grant’s letter seemed, on the face of it, both as cheerful and as brief as usual. She “supposed Lucy had heard nothing lately, as she knew she would have let her know if she had.” “Sailing vessels are often out of their reckoning for weeks and weeks,” she added. She dropped a word of congratulation that Lucy’s own welcoming day was assuredly near at hand now, and of half-comic self-condolence that hers was so much farther off. “In my case, too, one suspense is no sooner over than another begins,” she wrote. “But that’s the lot of the sailor’s wife, and I know it was all in my bargain when I took the captain.”