ignoring the full stop, "everything seems satisfactorily arranged,
packed though we are like herrings in a barrel, and forced to stand the
perambulator which the landlady quite naturally won't allow...."

Such were Betty Flanders's letters to Captain Barfoot--many-paged, tear-
stained. Scarborough is seven hundred miles from Cornwall: Captain
Barfoot is in Scarborough: Seabrook is dead. Tears made all the dahlias
in her garden undulate in red waves and flashed the glass house in her
eyes, and spangled the kitchen with bright knives, and made Mrs. Jarvis,
the rector's wife, think at church, while the hymn-tune played and Mrs.
Flanders bent low over her little boys' heads, that marriage is a
fortress and widows stray solitary in the open fields, picking up
stones, gleaning a few golden straws, lonely, unprotected, poor
creatures. Mrs. Flanders had been a widow for these two years.

"Ja--cob! Ja--cob!" Archer shouted.

"Scarborough," Mrs. Flanders wrote on the envelope, and dashed a bold
line beneath; it was her native town; the hub of the universe. But a
stamp? She ferreted in her bag; then held it up mouth downwards; then
fumbled in her lap, all so vigorously that Charles Steele in the Panama
hat suspended his paint-brush.

Like the antennae of some irritable insect it positively trembled. Here
was that woman moving--actually going to get up--confound her! He struck
the canvas a hasty violet-black dab. For the landscape needed it. It was
too pale--greys flowing into lavenders, and one star or a white gull
suspended just so--too pale as usual. The critics would say it was too
pale, for he was an unknown man exhibiting obscurely, a favourite with
his landladies' children, wearing a cross on his watch chain, and much