“After that my days were filled with one constant thought. I calculated the nearest date, and then coaxed myself into the belief that there would be a delay after that date had come and gone; a long delay; perhaps a month. So many things might happen, Ruth might not be able to get the seed, she might put off writing, she might simply send the seed with no covering letter at all. This last thought was unendurable. It grew, too, in my mind: people of Ruth’s upbringing and education didn’t like writing letters, they didn’t like perpetuating their opinions so irrevocably as ink on paper perpetuated them, and anyway they always had a conviction that the letter once written, would not arrive, especially at an unheard-of-place like Ephesus. It was difficult enough to imagine the safe transit of a letter from one English county to another, but that a letter posted in the Weald of Kent should arrive in due course at a place out of the Bible was unthinkable.... I became daily more persuaded that she would not write, and daily my gloom deepened. MacPherson noticed it. “‘Feel ill?’ he asked. “‘No, thanks,’ I said, annoyed. “‘You’re not starting cholera?’ he suggested suspiciously. “‘No, I tell you; I’m perfectly well.’ “‘Glad of that,’ he said, but I told myself peevishly that his gladness was based entirely on considerations of his own convenience. “Ten days passed; a fortnight; three weeks; I was in despair. Then one morning, as I came out of our door with a basket in my hand to pick up a couple of eggs for breakfast, I saw a large magenta patch down below, on the hilly pathway which led from our house to the village. This, I knew, must be the old negro woman who brought our rare letters. I watched her; the morning was slightly misty, for it was very early, not long after sunrise, and I saw her black face emerge from the plum-coloured mashlak she wore. I started off to meet her. She came toiling up the hill, panting and blowing, for she was enormously fat, but an indestructibly good-humoured grin parted her lips over her gleaming teeth, and suddenly I fancied a grotesque resemblance to Mrs. Pennistan, and I laughed aloud as though a good omen had come to speed me. “I came up to her. Her black skin was glistening with moisture, and her vast body rocked and swayed about inside her gaudy magenta wrapper; I suspected it of being her only covering. Still, I almost loved her as with a chatter of Turkish she produced a great black arm and hand out of the folds of her mashlak—a fat black hand so ludicrously like Mrs. Pennistan’s fat white one, holding a little packet which she tendered to me.