“How could you let your husband go away, ma’am?”
“I don’t think I can,” said Mrs. West, “again.” She found the letter and took the thin sheets carefully from the envelope. “But I felt that I ought not to be selfish all through my life.”
“Weren’t you the sister who looked after Bobbie in the hospital, ma’am?” Mrs. West nodded and smoothed out the sheets of note paper. “I wasn’t quite sure whether Mr. West wouldn’t go and marry some one else, considering—I s’pose I’ve no business to say so—but considering the way you kept putting him off.”
“I took care,” said Mrs. Myddleton West quickly, “that he should not do anything so absurd. Shall I begin the letter?”
“If you please, ma’am,” said Beatrice Bell, looking up respectfully. Mrs. Myddleton West commenced.
“My dearest, ever dearest,” she stopped. “I don’t think I need trouble you with the first page at all,” she said with some confusion.
“I know what you mean, ma’am. Start where he begins to speak of Bobbie.”
It appeared that Bobbie came in about the middle of the second sheet. The war correspondent out at Delar had intuitively written on one side of the paper only, and Trixie Bell noted this deplorable want of economy, but West’s small handwriting managed to convey a good long letter.
“You remember our young friend Bobbie Lancaster. The lad, now a sailor attached to H.M.S. Pompous, is on the launch where I am writing, and he did this afternoon an act of quiet bravery which ought, I think, to make his country feel that the trouble it took to make a man of him was not wasted. I am sending an account of the incident to my journal by the post which takes this letter to you, but you will care to have fuller particulars. How I wish that the mail were also taking me to the arms—”
“That,” said Mrs. West, “is, of course, merely by the way.”