"Well, if Jacob doesn't want to play" (the shadow of Archer, her eldest
son, fell across the notepaper and looked blue on the sand, and she felt
chilly--it was the third of September already), "if Jacob doesn't want
to play"--what a horrid blot! It must be getting late. "Where IS that tiresome little boy?" she said. "I don't see him. Run and
find him. Tell him to come at once." "...but mercifully," she scribbled,
ignoring the full stop, "everything seems satisfactorily arranged,
packed though we are like herrings in a barrel, and forced to stand the
perambulator which the landlady quite naturally won't allow...." Such were Betty Flanders's letters to Captain Barfoot--many-paged, tear-
stained. Scarborough is seven hundred miles from Cornwall: Captain
Barfoot is in Scarborough: Seabrook is dead. Tears made all the dahlias
in her garden undulate in red waves and flashed the glass house in her
eyes, and spangled the kitchen with bright knives, and made Mrs. Jarvis,
the rector's wife, think at church, while the hymn-tune played and Mrs.
Flanders bent low over her little boys' heads, that marriage is a
fortress and widows stray solitary in the open fields, picking up
stones, gleaning a few golden straws, lonely, unprotected, poor
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