"I'm going down to see Dunn about the boy." He paused at the door. "Was there anything else in the post?"
"Two bills and a sermon from Aunt Wendlow."
"Burn the sermon. Pay the bills if we can and burn them if we can't." And he went out, and she heard him on the stair, and then the long low complaint of the garden door.
Anne sat at the writing table for a long time without writing anything. The light went out of the window and the candles burned down an inch. From the stable cupola the cracked bell struck five, flat, and then six. When at last she began, she wrote steadily for an hour, filling three sides of the paper in her fine sloping hand, and did not stop to read any of it back.
When Myles came in again at nine, smelling of rain and tallow, she had it ready on the table with the pen beside it.
"Sign," she said.
He sat down and took the pen awkwardly in his left hand and made the black backward scrawl at the foot of the third page. He did not read it. He had not read one of them since July. He had told himself at first that it was because reading in his sister's hand what he had told her to say made him feel like a schoolboy who has had his exercise corrected; and later, that it was because he did not need to, because Anne had always known what he meant. Both were true. Neither was the reason.
"What have I said?"
"That you read it. That the heron has gone up river."
"Is that all? It's three pages."
"Near enough." Anne took the letter from under his hand, sanded it, folded it, and sealed it with the raven, pressing down with her thumb a little longer than she needed to. "She writes long letters. It's only manners to answer at the same length."
"You're very good to me, Nan."