“I shall be angry with him if he’s not a good correspondent,” said Mrs Dale, when she and Lily were alone together.

“No, mamma, you mustn’t be angry with him.  I won’t let you be angry with him.  Please to remember he’s my lover and not yours.”

“But I can see you when you watch for the postman.”

“I won’t watch for the postman any more if it makes you have bad thoughts about him.  Yes, they are bad thoughts.  I won’t have you think that he doesn’t do everything that is right.”

On the next morning the postman brought a letter, or rather a note, and Lily at once saw that it was from Crosbie.  She had contrived to intercept it near the back door, at which the postman called, so that her mother should not watch her watchings, nor see her disappointment if none should come.  “Thank you, Jane,” she said, very calmly, when the eager, kindly girl ran to her with the little missive; and she walked off to some solitude, trying to hide her impatience.  The note had seemed so small that it amazed her; but when she opened it the contents amazed her more.  There was neither beginning nor end.  There was no appellation of love, and no signature.  It contained but two lines.  “I will write to you at length to-morrow.  This is my first day in London, and I have been so driven about that I cannot write.”  That was all, and it was scrawled on half a sheet of note-paper.  Why, at any rate, had he not called her his dearest Lily?  Why had he not assured her that he was ever her own?  Such expressions, meaning so much, may be conveyed in a glance of the pen.  “Ah,” she said, “if he knew how I hunger and thirst after his love!”

She had but a moment left to her before she must join her mother and sister, and she used that moment in remembering her promise.  “I know it is all right,” she said to herself.  “He does not think of these things as I do.  He had to write at the last moment,—­as he was leaving his office.”  And then with a quiet, smiling face, she walked into the breakfast-parlour.

“What does he say, Lily?” asked Bell.

“What would you give to know?” said Lily.

“I wouldn’t give twopence for the whole of it,” said Bell.

“When you get anybody to write to you letters, I wonder whether you’ll show them to everybody?”

“But if there’s any special London news, I suppose we might hear it,” said Mrs Dale.

“But suppose there’s no special London news, mamma.  The poor man had only been in town one day, you know:  and there never is any news at this time of the year.”

“Had he seen Uncle Christopher?”

“I don’t think he had; but he doesn’t say.  We shall get all the news from him when he comes.  He cares much more about London news than Adolphus does.”  And then there was no more said about the letter.

But Lily had read her two former letters over and over again at the breakfast-table; and though she had not read them aloud, she had repeated many words out of them, and had so annotated upon them that her mother, who had heard her, could have almost re-written them.  Now, she did not even show the paper; and then her absence, during which she had read the letter, had hardly exceeded a minute or two.  All this Mrs Dale observed, and she knew that her daughter had been again disappointed.