A thousand slimy,
humbugging old aunts should not keep them apart. From Portsmouth he
wrote a letter to his sweetheart on every day of the year for three
years--except on those days of joyous leave when he could get away and
talk to her instead of writing to her. At the end of the three years
the postmastership at Rodchurch became vacant, and he boldly applied
for the place.
His life just then was almost too glorious to be true. All
difficulties and dangers seemed to melt away in a sort of warm haze of
rapture. Mrs. Petherick no longer opposed the marriage; Mr. Barradine,
at the zenith of political power, exerted his influence; the
postmastership was obtained. To top up, Dale made the not unpleasing
discovery that Mavis was an heiress as well as an orphan. She had two
hundred pounds of her very own, "which came in uncommon handy for the
furnishing."
And his education did not cease with wedlock. Mavis was always
improving him, especially in regard to diction. He was pleased to
think that he made very few slips nowadays--an "h" elided here and
there; the vowels still rather broad, more particularly the Hampshire
"a"; and one or two unchanged words, such as "boosum." But these
microscopic faults were of no consequence, and Mav had stopped teasing
him about them.
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