Lavinia blushed, and before she knew it Mrs. Marley had bent over and kissed her cheek. "He has a long hard battle before him, my dear," she said, "in a great cruel city. We must help him all we can." Lavinia hesitated a moment, then she put her arms about Mrs. Marley and drew her down for the kiss which sealed their friendship. They sat and talked of Marley for a long time, and at last when Lavinia rose to go, she held out to Mrs. Marley the letter her son had written her. She looked at it a moment before handing it to Mrs. Marley. "Would you like to keep it?" Mrs. Marley asked. "May I?" "If you wish. But you must come often; I shall be lonely now, you know, and you must bring his letters and read parts of them. He'll be writing so many more to you than he will to me." Lavinia received a letter from Marley every day; it was not long before Clemmons, the postman, smiled significantly when, each morning at the sound of his whistle, she ran to meet him at the door. And Lavinia wrote to Marley as regularly herself, sitting at the little desk in her room every night long after the house was dark and still. The judge could find no hope in the observations Mrs. Blair reported to him. "She seems to have developed a new idea of constancy," said Mrs. Blair. "She will not allow herself to do a thing, or go to a single place; she will hardly accept any pleasure because he isn't here to share it. I believe she tries not to have a thought that is not of him. She is almost fanatical about it." "Oh dear!" said the judge. "I thought the nightly calls were a severe strain, but they can not compare to the strain of nightly letters." "He writes excellent letters, however," Mrs. Blair said. "I wish you could read the one he wrote his mother. A boy who writes like that to his mother--" "How did you get to see a letter he wrote his mother?" interrupted the judge. "Lavinia showed it to me." "Has she been over there?" "Yes. Why?" The judge shook his head gravely, as if the situation were now hopeless, indeed. CHAPTER XXVI THE ARMY OF THE UNEMPLOYED "I am very tired to-night," Marley wrote to Lavinia a day or so later. "I have been making the rounds of the law offices; I have been to all the leading firms, but--here I am, still without a place. I thought I might get a place in one of them where I could finish my law studies, and make enough to live on, meanwhile; I had dreams of working into the firm in time, but they were only dreams, and all my hopes have gone glimmering. The men who are employed in the law offices are already admitted to the bar; most of them are young fellows, but some are old and gray-headed, and the sight of them gave me the blues.