There’s quite a party of us.  Leila and her father and the Jeliffes and Colin kept to their original plan of coming in May, and we decided it would be best to cross at the same time, so there’s Aunt Frances and Grace and Aunt Isabelle, and Porter—­and me—­ten of us.  If you and Cousin Patty were here, you’d round out a dozen.  I wish you were here.  How Cousin Patty would enjoy it—­with her lovely enthusiasms, and her interest in everything.  Do give her much love.  I shall write to her when I reach London, for I know she will be traveling with us in spirit; she said she was going to live in England by proxy this summer, and I shall help her all I can by sending pictures, and you must tell her the books to read.

To think that I am on my way to the London of your Dick Whittington!  I call him yours because you made me really see him for the first time.

“There was he an orphan, O, a little lad alone.”

And I am to hear all the bells, and to see the things I have always longed to see!  Yet—­and I haven’t told this to any one but you, Roger Poole, the thought doesn’t bring one little bit of gladness—­it isn’t London that I want, or England.  I want my garden and my old big house, and things as they used to be.

But I am sailing fast away from it—­the old life into the new!

So far we have had fair weather.  It is always best to speak of the weather first, isn’t it?—­so that we can have our minds free for other things.  It hasn’t been at all rough; even Leila, who isn’t a good sailor, has been able to stay on deck and people are so much interested in her.  She seems such a child for her widow’s black.  Oh, what children they were, my boy Barry and his little wife, and yet they were man and woman, too.  Leila has been letting me see some of his letters; he showed her a side which he never revealed to me, but I am not jealous.  I am only glad that, for her, my boy Barry became a man.

But I am going to try to keep the sadness out of my scribbles to you, only now and then it will creep in, and you must forgive it, because you see it isn’t easy to think that we are all here who loved him, and he, who loved so much to be with us, is somewhere—­oh, where is he, Roger Poole, in that vast infinity which stretches out and out, beyond the sea, beyond the sky, into eternity?

All day I have been lying in my deck chair, and have let the world go by.  It is clear and cool, and the sea rises up like a wall of sapphire.  Last night we seemed to plough through a field of gold.  The world is really a lovely place, the big outside world, but it isn’t the outside world which makes our happiness, it is the world within us, and when the heart is tired——­

But now I must talk of some one else besides my self.