CHAPTER XIX. MR. HENLEY AT HOME FOR a month, Mountjoy remained in his cottage on the shores of the Solway Firth, superintending the repairs. His correspondence with Iris was regularly continued; and, for the first time in his experience of her, was a cause of disappointment to him. Her replies revealed an incomprehensible change in her manner of writing, which became more and more marked in each succeeding instance. Notice it as he might in his own letters, no explanation followed on the part of his correspondent. She, who had so frankly confided her joys and sorrows to him in past days, now wrote with a reserve which seemed only to permit the most vague and guarded allusion to herself. The changes in the weather; the alternation of public news that was dull, and public news that was