When the postman had gone Dale stood trembling.  One of the letters was from her.  He felt unnerved by the mere sight of her handwriting on the envelope—­the hand that was so like his own, the hand that she had taught herself by laborious study and imitation of his official copper-plate; and he thought, “If I was wise I shouldn’t open it.  If I was strong enough, I should just burn it, without reading.  For, whatever’s inside, it’s going to make me one bit more desp’rate than I am now.”

He snatched up his hat, went out of the house, and walked along the road holding her letter pressed tight against his heart.  There was a gentle air that floated pleasantly over the fields, and in spite of all the heavy rain that had fallen such a little while ago, the white dust rose in high clouds when a motor-car came whizzing by.  After the car two timber wagons crept slowly, and then there were children trailing a broken perambulator; but directly the road became vacant again, he leaned against a gate and opened the envelope.  He had felt that he must be quite alone when he read what she said to him, and had intended to go farther, but he could not wait any more.

“Sir, I beg to say”—­That was how he had taught her to begin all letters:  she knew no other mode of address.  “I beg to say this is a very large place and you can see the sea from the bedrooms.”

He read on; and his pleasure was so exquisite and his pain so laceratingly sharp that the sky and the acids swam round and round.

...  “There’s nice girls here, one or two.  Nellie Evans do all she can to make me not so miserable She has a sweetheart at Rodchurch.  They all have their boys if you believe their talk.

“And all the marks at the end are the sweet kisses I give my boy.  For you are my boy now—­my own secret one, and I am your loving girl

“Norah.”

She was thinking only of him; she wanted no one younger and handsomer; in her eyes and thoughts he was not old:  he was her boy.  Those words had a terrible effect upon him.  They entered his blood as if they had been an injection of some sweetly narcotic drug; thy lanced deep into his bowels as if they had been a surgeon’s knife; they made him like a half-anesthetized patient who at the same time dreams of paradise and feels that he is bleeding to death.

“You are my boy ... and I am your loving girl.”

He moved from the gate, hurried along the dusty road, and entered Hadleigh Wood at the first footpath.  As he got over the stile he was saying to himself, “This letter finishes me.  I can’t go on with it after this.  I’m done for.”

Then, as he walked in the cool silence beneath the dark firs, he held her letter to his lips—­kissed the inked crosses that she had set as marks to represent her kisses—­counted and kissed them and counted them until his hot tears blinded him.

She wanted him; she longed for him; he was her boy.