And she, missing the giggle and the playfulness from the letter, thought his distress extreme indeed.

For it would have required a deeper sorrow than Smith Westcott ever felt to make him talk in the stiff conventional fashion in which his letters were composed.
And besides Westcott's letters there were letters from her mother, in which that careful mother never failed to tell how Mr.Westcott had come in, the evening before, to talk about Katy, and to tell her how lost and heart-broken he was.

So that letters from home generally brought on a relapse of Katy's devotion to her lover.

She was cruelly torn by alternate fits of loving pity for poor dear Brother Albert on the one hand, and poor, dear, _dear_ Smith Westcott on the other.

And the latter generally carried the day in her sympathies.