But Jinny did not appear on Friday with the musical instrument. Only the unexpected arrived—in the shape of Bundock. That royal messenger was visibly hipped as he delivered the letter to Will.

“A woman’s writing!” he observed reproachfully. “That means dragging me here time and again!”

But Will had broken open the high-class adhesive envelope and was already absorbed in the letter.

So Jinny had got in first in the pen-fight! And her letter bowled him over, not only by its bland assumption that she was already established as his carrier, but by the fluency and scholarship of its style, with its incomprehensible “superscribe” and “q.f.” He felt baffled too and even snubbed by the signature, which gave her a businesslike remoteness, and even a legitimate status as a mere representative of the masculine, besides making him feel he had lost a chance by not sending off one of his many scrawls to the address of this same “Daniel Quarles.” His answer would now require the profoundest excogitation, he felt, as he adjusted her missive between the bank-notes and the glove. There was, moreover, the material problem of vying with this real and fashionable correspondence paper. Ultimately he became conscious that Bundock was still standing at attention.

“Do you want anything?” he asked tartly.

“I’m waiting for the answer,” said Bundock nobly, “or you won’t catch a post till to-morrow night unless you trudge to Long Bradmarsh.”

“Oh, there’s no answer—none at all! Thank you all the same.”

“Thank you!” said Bundock. “It’s not often folks consider me nowadays—especially when there’s a woman in the case. They just go on shuttlecocking letters till my feet are sore.”

“But it isn’t a woman!” said Will stiffly. “It’s just a business letter from Gaffer Quarles.” And he pulled it out, and the little glove fell out with it: which did not lessen his annoyance.

“Daniel Quarles never put his fist to a pen this ten year,” asserted Bundock. “He was glad to be done with writing, says my father, for Daniel was never brought up to be a carrier, his parents never dreaming he’d inherit the business.”

“Why not, isn’t he the eldest?”

“The contrairy. Blackwater Hall and the bit of land is one of those queer properties that go to the youngest, if you die without a will.”

“The youngest?”

“Ay, and that’s what Daniel was. Borough English, ’tis called by scholars,” said Bundock impressively. “However, he picked up a little from his brother Sidrach, who had already set up as a carrier on his own account round about Harwich, and a pretty business he did, old Sidrach, says my father, before he was discovered to be an owler and had to fly to America.”

“Were they so persecuted?” murmured Will.

“And didn’t they deserve it—smuggling our good English wool into France! Pack-horses they loaded with it, the rascals.”

“Oh, I thought they were a sect!”

Bundock laughed. “That’s with an aitch; though I dare say many a man owled all the week and howled on Sunday—he, he, he! Do you know—between you and I—who it is writes the hymns?”

“The village idiot!” answered Will smartly. “You told me so when I was a boy,” he added, seeing the postman’s disconcerted expression.

Bundock brightened up. “Ah, I thought ’twas too clever for you. But as for this letter o’ yours, it’s clearly a woman’s handwriting, and if Jinny once begins writing to her customers, it’s a bad look-out for me.”

Bundock might well feel a grievance, for this was the first letter Jinny had ever written to a client, indeed to anybody with the exception of old Commander Dap, who, clinging to the friendship struck up at his wife’s funeral, sent her birthday presents and the gossip of the Watch Vessel. To him she had written as her heart and her illiteracy prompted, but the elegant epistle received by Will Flynt was not achieved without considerable pains. She had the advantage, however, of not being limited to the Bible for her vocabulary, possessing as she did an almost modern guide in the shape of an olla podrida of a Spelling-Book, whose first edition dated no further back than 1755, the year of the Lisbon Earthquake. “The Universal Spelling-Book” had originally belonged to the “owler,” and it was from the almost limitless resources of this quaint reservoir that, with a pardonable desire not to be outshone by her much-travelled neighbour, she culled both the “superscribe” defined as “to write over” and the q.f. (given in the “List of Abbreviations” as standing for the Latin of “a sufficient quantity”), except that she misread the long “s” for an “f.” The immaculate spelling was, however, no mean feat, for the book’s vocabulary was very incomplete and devoid of order, so that she had almost as much steeplechasing to do as her rival letter-writer. Moreover, she must fain study whole columns of traps for the unwary, where the terms of her own occupation appeared with disconcerting frequency. If there was not in the letter any necessity for distinguishing between “glutinous” and “gluttonous,” “rheum” and “Rome,” or any risk of confusing a “widow” with a “relic,” still “seller,” “fare,” “due”—any of which she might have needed—all had their dangerous doubles, and she did not write “call” without carefully discriminating it from “Cawl, of a Wig or Bowels.” “Punctuality and dispatch” was lifted bodily from Miss Gentry’s billheads, and if she did not offer to send off goods to Asia and Africa, it was because only “Europe, America, and Australia” figured on Mr. Flippance’s posters.

The recipient of this impressive communication was staggered by the strides in female education made since his boyhood. He betook himself at once—to his mother’s joy—to the Bible, like a Cromwell before a great battle. Martha had stolen the book back to the kitchen and was pondering texts anxiously when he wandered in to hunt for it.

“Who sent you a letter?” she inquired uneasily.

“Old Quarles,” he answered readily. “It’s about an order he can’t supply, and he asks me to tell you his granddaughter won’t be coming to-day.”

Martha’s face lit up. “What a pity!” she cried. “She might have taken my bonnet to Miss Gentry to be re-trimmed.” Martha had become reconciled to this minor vanity, now it was strategically unnecessary. “However, your young legs can do that, dearie, now they’re back, can’t they?”

“With pleasure, mother,” he said, all unconscious of the lapsed plan. “Why waste money on carriers?”

She kissed him passionately, but seeing his anxiety to be at the Bible, she released him.

“I should look at Revelation, one, ten, Willie,” she advised, “and you’ll understand why the Sabbath——”

“Yes, yes,” he interrupted soothingly.

“Also Colossians, two, sixteen and seventeen—the seventh day is but a shadow of things to come.”

“I see,” he said, escaping.

It took hours of hard theological study—indeed till Saturday morning—before the reply to Jinny shaped itself:

“Sir,—Mr. William Flynt thanks Mr. Daniel Quarles for his esteemed epistle, and regrets to learn that a coach-horn of suitable size for a gentelman is not to be had in Chipstone. I beseech you, however, not to superscribe to Chelmsford as Methuselah cannot fetch such a compass, and the righteous man regardeth his beast. Neither do I require a horn at her hand now or henceforwards.

“Yours truly,

“William Flynt.

“P.S.—Do you think that a maiden of your years aught to superscribe alone to Chelmsford, a city full of lewdness and abominations, where men use deceit with their tongues and the poison of asps is under their lips?”