It was while he was still at the watering that the elder Simpson drove
up to the house door in his gig. He had been to the post-office. This
was not an event that happened every day, so that the letter which he
now handed Caius might as well as not have been retarded a day or two in
its delivery. Caius took it, leading the horses to their stalls, and he
examined it by the light of the stable lantern.
The writing, the appearance of the envelope and post-mark, were all
quite unfamiliar. The writing was the fine Italian hand common to ladies
of a former generation, and was, in Caius' mind, connected only with the
idea of elderly women. He opened the letter, therefore, with the less
curiosity. Inside he found several pages of the same fine writing, and
he read it with his arm round the neck of one of the horses. The
lantern, which he had hung on a nail in the stall, sent down dim
candlelight upon the pair.
When Caius had read the letter, he turned it over and over curiously,
and began to read it again, more out of sheer surprise than from any
relish for its contents. It was written by one Madame Josephine Le
Maitre, and came from a place which, although not very far from his own
home, was almost as unknown to him as the most remote foreign part. It
came from one of the Magdalen Islands, that lie some eighty miles'
journey by sea to the north of his native shore.
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