‘There is your grandfather,’ she said. ‘Oh, my dear, take that away, and write as you please: but don’t say anything about it, for I have not spoken to him. And it is not as if I were sending for her, John. I am only saying that I should like to see her. Of course I should like to see her, every mother wishes that, to see her child. Write out of your own head; but don’t say anything about it, and quick, quick, take all that away!’ CHAPTER IX. JOHN’S LETTER. John was allowed to sit in the parlour now that he was almost a man, after the old people had gone to bed. His own room was small, and it had been agreed upon as a reasonable thing that he should have a place in which he could sit and read, or write--till eleven o’clock, at least. Mr. Sandford retired to his room at ten exactly, every night, and, since she had been so ill--no, not ill, tired--his wife had preceded him, going upstairs very early, in that unaccountable but quite gentle fatigue which had come over her. All the afternoon and evening John had been very silent, thinking--chiefly what he was to say in his letter to his mother--but also about all the circumstances, the strangeness of the household life altogether, the extraordinary separation which, now that conveyance was so easy, now that everybody travelled, when even little Joe Hodge, who was apprenticed in London, came home every Christmas to see his mother, a poor widow in the alms-houses--was more wonderful than ever. In old times it might have been understood, when there were no railways, in the days which the old people remembered--but now! It perplexed him beyond description, when his thoughts were fully directed to the subject. And it became clear to him all at once, as when a landscape suddenly becomes apparent to us on turning a corner or coming to the top of a hill, that some other reason must exist for this than the simple fact that his mother lived in London and his grandparents at Edgeley. That was no reason; his enlightened mind rejected it. All the afternoon he kept turning over and over in his mind what he was to say. He had never in his life written an important letter, scarcely ever written one at all which was not suggested, partly dictated even, by the old people, who would say to him, ‘You must write to Susie,’ or, ‘Don’t you think, John, that you ought to write to your mother?’ This was how his correspondence had generally been conducted. He had written a few schoolboy epistles to Dick and Percy, but they did not count. He thought a great deal of the importance of the letter. Phrases for it, sentences which he polished and reconstructed, and which he felt, with a little satisfaction, would come very well, kept passing through his mind in a sort of procession. Sometimes he felt that he had put a thing very strongly indeed, that his mother must feel herself entirely in the wrong, and change her procedure altogether. He was not aware that people