Thus Jack Fenning vanished, but in the next day or two there came the letter from Ora, the letter which was bound to come in view of the new things she had learnt. Ora was not exactly angry, but she was evidently puzzled. She gave him thanks for keeping Jack away from her, out of her sight and her knowledge. "But," she wrote, "I don't understand about afterwards; because you found out from Mr. Hazlewood things that might have made, oh, all the difference, if you'd told them to me and if you'd wanted them to. I don't understand why you didn't tell me; we could have done what's being done now and I should have got free. Didn't you want me free? I can't and won't think that you didn't really love me, that you wouldn't really have liked to have me for your own. But I don't know what else I can think. It does look like it. I wish I could see you, Ashley, because I think I might perhaps understand then why you acted as you did; I'm sure you had a reason, but I can't see what it was. When we were together, I used to know how you thought and felt about things, and so perhaps, if we were together now, you could make me understand why you treated me like this. But we're such a long way off from one another. Do you remember saying that I should begin to come back as soon as ever I went away, and that every day would bring me nearer to you again? It isn't like that; you get farther away. It's not only that I'm not with you now, but somehow it comes to seem as if I'd never been with you—not as we really were, so much together. And so I don't know any more how you feel, and I can't understand how you did nothing after what you found out from Mr. Hazlewood. Because it really would have made all the difference. I don't want to reproach you, but I just don't understand. I shall be travelling about a lot in the next few weeks and shan't have time to write many letters. Good-bye."
It was what she must think, less by far than she might seem to have excuse for saying. He had no answer to it, no answer that he could send to her, no answer that he could carry to her, without adding a sense of hurt to the bewilderment that she felt. Of course too she forgot how large a share the play and the part, with all they stood for, had had in the separation and distance between them which she deplored as so sore a barrier to understanding. She saw only that there had been means by which Jack Fenning might have been cleared out of the way, means by which he was in fact now being cleared out of the way, and that Ashley had chosen to conceal them from her and not to use them himself. Hence her puzzled pain, and her feeling that she had lost her hold on him and her knowledge of his mind. Reading the letter, he could not stifle some wonder that her failure to understand was so complete. He would not be disloyal to her; anything that was against her was wrung from him reluctantly. But had she no shrinking from what was being done, no repugnance at it, no sense that she was soiled and a sordid tinge given to her life? No, she had none of these things; she wanted to be free; he could have freed her and would not; now Sidney Hazlewood and Babba Flint were setting her at liberty. He was far off, they were near; he was puzzling, their conduct was intelligible. She felt herself growing more and more separated from him; was she not growing nearer and nearer to them? The law ruled and the tendency worked through such incidents as these; in them they sprang to light and were fully revealed, their underlying strength became momentarily open and manifest. They would go on ruling and working, using the puzzle, the wound, the resentment, the separation, the ever-growing distance, the impossibility of understanding. These things blotted out memories, so that his very face would grow blurred for her, the tones of his voice dim and strange, the touch of his lips alien and forgotten. She would be travelling a lot in the next few weeks and would not have time to write many letters. He knew, as he read, that she would write no more letters at all, that this was the last to come from her to him, the last that would recall the intimate and sweet companionship whose ending it deplored with poor pathetic bewilderment. She did not see how they came to be so far apart and to be drifting farther and farther apart; she saw only the fact. Was it any easier for him to bear because he seemed to see the reason and the necessity?
So, "Good-bye," she ended; and it was the end.
He put the letter away in the drawer whence he had taken the bank-notes for Jack Fenning, drew a chair up to the table and, sitting down, untied the red tape round a brief which lay there. He began to read but broke off when he had read a few lines and sat for a moment or two, looking straight in front of him.
"Yes," he said, "there's an end of that." And he went on with the brief. It was indeed the most natural thing in the world.
CHAPTER XXIV "A GOOD SIGHT"
"One unbroken round of triumph from the hour we landed to the hour we left," said Babba Flint. He was off duty, had dined well, and come on to Mrs. Pocklington's rather late; although perfectly master of himself, he was not inclined at this moment to think less well of the world than it deserved.
"Including the legal proceedings?" asked Irene Bowdon, studying the figure on her French fan.