"My lord,
"Your letter came this morning, and I was glad of it, though I confess I read it twice before I understood that I was glad. It is a strange thing to be engaged to a man and to know so little of him that one must learn him from his bridges.
"So let me tell you that I am sorry about yours, and sorrier for the tenants who must go round by Alnham, which I have looked for on my father's map and found, very small, at the edge of the hills. Six miles is a long way to go round. I hope your men are quick.
"It is cold here too. They lit the fires this morning and the whole house apologised. The swifts came back to the Abbey in May as they always do, and now they go screaming round the tower as if they have been cheated and mean to complain to someone. I don't blame them. One flies all the way from Africa and finds November.
"Please thank Lady Anne for her pains. Her hand is very beautiful. I am glad of it; I should not like to have missed a word.
"My father is well and sends his compliments.
"Your servant,"
Thomasin stopped there and passed the pen to her cousin, and Dorothea, with her tongue between her teeth and her face red, wrote her own name in large careful letters at the foot of the page, the D facing the right way only because Thomasin had drawn a small faint pencil mark beside it for her to aim at. Afterward Thomasin rubbed the mark away with bread.
"What did you put about the swifts?" Dorothea asked, sanding it.
"Only that they have come back."
"Good," said Dorothea. "Birds are safe." And she went to dress for the Pump Room, and the letter went north on the evening mail, and that was how it began: with a lie so small that neither of them could have found it with a candle.
II.