"From Clawbonny--but from Grace," he answered, with a slight change of
colour. "I desired the poor girl to let me know how things passed off,
after we left them; and as for Lucy, her pot-hooks are so much out of
the way, I never want to see them."

I felt hurt, offended, that my sister should write to any youngster
but myself. It is true, the letter was to a bosom friend, a
co-adventurer, one almost a child of the same family; and I had come
to the office expecting to get a letter from Rupert's sister, who had
promised, while weeping on the wharf, to do exactly the same thing for
me; but there _is_ a difference between one's sister writing to
another young man, and another young man's sister writing to
oneself. I cannot even now explain it; but that there _is_ a
difference I am sure. Without asking to see a line that Grace had
written, I went into the office, and returned in a minute or two, with
an air of injured dignity, holding Lucy's epistle in my hand.

After all, there was nothing in either letter to excite much
sensibility. Each was written with the simplicity, truth and feeling
of a generous-minded, warm-hearted female friend, of an age not to
distrust her own motives, to a lad who bad no right to view the favour
other than it was, as an evidence of early and intimate friendship.
Both epistles are now before me, and I copy them, as the shortest way
of letting the reader know the effect our disappearance had produced
at Clawbonny. That of Grace was couched in the following terms:


DEAR RUPERT: