What business had people to give him the trouble of reading them?
The floor was becoming strewn with his correspondence.

The empty fireplace had become a target for crumpled balls of paper.
A short one in a large, scrambling, illiterate hand with a signature that might mean anything.

That tall capital, shaped like a ham, was perhaps a B.
The letter was written on Priesthope notepaper.

"_My daughter Magdalen._" This, then, was from Colonel Bellairs.
It was not such a very bad letter, but it was a deplorably unwise one.
When had Colonel Bellairs ever indited a wise one! But he made his precarious position even less tenable by ignoring the fact that Lord Lossiemouth's fortunes had altered, by asserting that he had had it in his mind to write to this effect the previous Christmas but had not had time.

When Colonel Bellairs concocted that sentence he had felt, not without pride, that it covered the ground of his fifteen years' silence, and also showed that Lord Lossiemouth's wealth had nothing to do with his recall.