_To Miss Josephine Summers, The Cottage, Potham, Beds._ 91B HARLEY STREET, W., _May_ 16, 1910. MY DEAR AUNT JOSEPHINE, It is certainly very wrong of Claire not to have written to thank you for the mittens. As you say, colds in the head are quite common in the months of May and June, and I have no doubt that if she wears them, as you suggest, whenever she goes out to play, they will keep her hands very warm indeed. I hope that you will hear from her in a day or two. With regard to the vicar's boy, I think, from what I remember of him, that you can quite safely leave him in the hands of the vicar's very wise housekeeper and your own excellent doctor. I doubt too if he would ever really constantly wear the flannel cholera-belt that you have been making for him; and in any case, I think a temporary abstinence from butter-scotch would be an even more effective measure. Your doctor is quite right about the tomatoes. There is no evidence to show that they cause cancer. But of course one must always be careful not to eat too many of them. No, the gravel from which, I am sorry to hear, the new lay-reader suffers has nothing to do with that which is found in gardens. And it is quite sufficient, as you say, to account for a little occasional hastiness in his temper. We are all glad to hear that you have been so busy and comparatively well, and both Esther and Molly join me in sending you their best love. Your affect. nephew, PETER HARDING. XVI _To Lady Wroxton, The Manor House, Stoke Magna, Oxon._ 91B HARLEY STREET, W., _May_ 23, 1910. MY DEAR LADY WROXTON, I was very glad, as were we all, to hear from you again after so long a silence, and gladder still to learn that the pleasant peacefulness of Stoke is doing its good work on your behalf so surely, if still a little slowly. For both from your own letter and that of Dr. Rochester I can see that the spirit of you is climbing back again towards the light, less lonely than you would have thought possible six months ago, and into an air as clear even as that which you and your husband breathed together before he was taken from you. I think that I know how hard must be the ascent, although in my own perhaps too peaceful life I have had little enough experience of these swift and terrible bereavements, that will come to me also, I must suppose, in their due time. And it is only from the share, sometimes completely professional, sometimes rather more intimate than this, that I have been called upon to take in such experiences of others that I seem to have learned a very little about the tides of grief.