The subtle imprisoned soul in Elfrida's letters always spoke to hers, but Janet never received so artistic a missive of three lines that she did not wish it were longer, and she had no fund of confidence to draw on to meet her friend's incomprehensible spaces of silence.

To cover her real soreness she scolded, chaffed brusquely, affected lofty sarcasms.
"Twelve days ago," she wrote, "you mentioned casually that you were threatened with pneumonia; your communication of to-day you devote to proving that Hector Malot is a carpenter.

I agree with you with reservations, but the sequence worries me.

In the meantime have you had the pneumonia ?" Her own letters were long and gossiping, full of the scent of the heather and the eccentricities of Donald Macleod; and she wrote them, regularly twice a week, using rainy afternoons for the purpose and every inch of the paper at her disposal.

Elfrida put a very few of them into the wooden box, just as she would have embalmed, if she could, a very few of the half-hours they had spent together..