This, dearest, is our first enforced absence from each other; and I feel it almost more hard on me than on you.  Beloved, let us lay our hearts together and get comforted.  It is not real separation to know that another part of the world contains the rest of me.  Oh, the rest of me, the rest of me that you are!  So, thinking of you, I can never be tired.  I rest yours.

LETTER XX.

Yes, Dearest, “Patience!” but it is a virtue I have little enough of naturally, and used to be taught to pray for as a child.  And I remember once really hurting clear Mother-Aunt’s feelings by trying to repay her for that teaching by a little iniquitous laughter at her expense.  It was too funny for me to feel very contrite about, as I do sometimes over quite small things, or I would not be telling it you now (for there are things in me I would conceal even from you).  I dare say you wouldn’t guess it, but the M.-A. is a most long person over her private devotions.  Perhaps it was her own habit, with the cares of a household sometimes conflicting, which made her recite to me so often her pet legend of a saintly person who, constantly interrupted over her prayers by mundane matters, became a pattern in patience out of these snippings of her godly desires.  So, one day, angels in the disguise of cross people with selfish demands on her time came seeking to know where in her composition or composure exasperation began:  and finding none, they let her return in peace to her missal, where for a reward all the letters had been turned into gold.  “And that, my dear, comes of patience,” my aunt would say, till I grew a little tired of the saying.  I don’t know what experience my uncle had gathered of her patience under like circumstances:  but I notice that to this day he treads delicately, like Agag, when he knows her to be on her knees; and prefers then to send me on his errands instead of doing them himself.

So it happened one day that he wanted a particular coat which had been put away in her clothes-closet—­and she was on her knees between him and it, with the time of her Amen quite indefinite.  I was sent, said my errand briefly, and was permitted to fumble out her keys from her pocket while she continued to kneel over her morning psalms.

What I brought to him turned out to be the wrong coat:  I went back and knocked for readmittance.  Long-sufferingly she bade me to come in.  I explained, and still she repressed herself, only saying in a tone of affliction, “Do see this time that you take the right one!”

After I had made my second selection, and proved it right on my uncle’s person, the parallelism of things struck me, and I skipped back to my aunt’s door and tapped.  I got a low wailing “Yes?” for answer—­a monosyllabic substitute for the “How long, O Lord?” of a saint in difficulties.  When I called through the keyhole, “Are your psalms written in gold?” she became really angry:—­I suppose because the miracle so well earned had not come to pass.