old healthy apple-color came
back to his cheeks.

Sometimes when the letter came they would place it under his blotter,
and if it was a Tuesday (and she generally wrote for Tuesday's
arrival) old Jamie's face would lengthen as he turned his mail over,
or fall if he saw his desk empty. Woe to the clerk who asked a favor
in those moments! Then the clerk next him would slyly turn the
blotting-paper over, and Jamie would grasp the letter and crowd it
into his pocket, and his face would gleam again. He never knew they
suspected it, but on such occasions the whole bank would combine to
invent a pretext for getting Jamie out of the room, that he might read
his letter undisturbed. Otherwise he let it go till lunch-time, and
then, they felt sure, took no lunch; for he would never read her
letters when any one was looking on. They all knew who she was. It was
the joke of years at the Old Colony Bank. They called Mercedes "old
Jamie's foreign mail."

She never wrote regularly, however; and if she missed, poor McMurtagh
would invent most elaborate schemes, extra presents (he always made
her an allowance), for extorting letters from her. The sight of her
handwriting at any time would make his heart beat. Harley Bowdoin had
by this time been taken into the counting-room. He was studying law as
a profession (there being little left of the business), and Jamie
appeared to be strangely fond of him. Often, by the ancient custom, he
would call Harleston "Mr. James," Mr. James Bowdoin having no sons.
Mr. James himself spoke of this intimacy once to his father. "Don't
you see it's because the boy fell in love with his Mercedes?" said the
old gentleman. Certain it is, the two were inseparable. One fancies
Harleston heard more of Mrs. St. Clair than either of Jamie's older
friends.

For Jamie, in her absence, grew to love all whom she had ever known,
all who had ever seen her; how much more, then, this young fellow who
had shown the grace to love her, too! Jamie was fond of walking to the
places she had known, and he even took to going to church himself, to
King's Chapel, where she had been so often. When his vacation came,
the next summer, he went on to New York, and stayed at a cheap hotel
on Fourth Avenue, and would go to see her; not too often, or when
other people were there, for he was still modest, and only dared hope
she might not hate him. It was all his fault, and perhaps he had been
hard with her husband. But she suffered him n