It was because Lois was really alarmed by this time that she said, "Oh, you must have been mistaken, Sweetapple!"
"Just as you say, 'm," Sweetapple agreed; "but I see him; it was him."
She withdrew again, reseating herself in the shade of the semicircular open porch protecting the side-door, where she had been writing on a pad. Though so near the roadway, a high growth of shrubs screened her from all but the passers up and down Willoughby's Lane. At this time of year they were relatively few, many of the residents of County Street having already gone to the seaside or the mountains. Lois enjoyed the seclusion thus afforded her, and the tranquillity. The garden and her poorer neighbors gave an outlet to her need for physical activity, while in the solitude of the house and in that wider solitude created by the absence of all the Willoughbys and Mastermans something within her was being healed. It was being healed—but healed in a way that left her changed. The change was manifest in what she said when, with the pad on her knee again, she began to write.
"I am deeply moved, dear Thor, by your last letter from Colorado Springs, and would gladly say something adequate in response to it. When I can I will—if I ever can. As to that the decisive word must be with time. I cannot hurry it. I can give you no assurance now. Now I feel—but why should I repeat it? An illusion once dispelled can rarely be brought back. Still less can you replace it by reality. What we are looking for is a substitute for love. You may have found it—but I have not. I can accept your definition of love as a giving out, a pouring forth, a desire to do and to contribute; but it is precisely here that I fail to respond to the test. There is something in me stagnated or dammed up. My heart feels like a well that has gone dry. I have nothing to yield. I understand what Rosie Fay said to me the day when I talked to her on Duck Rock: 'I'm empty; I've given all I had to give.' It was less blameworthy on her part than on mine, because she, poor little thing, had given so much and I so little. And yet my supply seems to be exhausted. It must have been thin and shallow to begin with. As I feel at present it would take a new creation to replenish it.
"With regard to my calling forth what is best in you, dear Thor—well, any one would do that or anything. You're one of those who have nothing but the best to offer. Do you know what Uncle Sim said of you last night?—'Thor is always on the side of the angels—and, though he makes mistakes, they'll rescue him.' They will, dear Thor; I'm sure of it. They may rescue us both—even if at present I don't see how."
Having written this much, she paused to ask what she should say further. Should she speak of his coming home? No. Since the address he had given her indicated that he was on his way, it was best that he should take the responsibility of his own return. Should she tell him that Sweetapple thought he had seen Claude? No. It would alarm him without doing any good. If Claude was back, he was back—besides which, Sweetapple might be wrong. So she signed her name with her usual significant abruptness, sealing the envelope and addressing it.
Her hesitation came in putting on the stamp. Somehow the letter seemed too cold to send. She didn't want to be cold—only to be sincere. Sincerity during these weeks of solitude had become a sort of obsession. She couldn't tell him that she had forgiven him as long as resentment lingered in her heart, and yet she was anxious not to wound him more than she could help. Wounding him she wounded herself more deeply, for in spite of everything his pain was hers.
Slowly she tore the letter open again, to a sunset chorus of birds of whose song she had just become conscious. From tree to tree they fluted to one another and answered back, now with a reckless, passionate warble, now with a long, liquid love-note. It was the voice of the rich world that lay around her—a world of flowers and lawns, and meadows and upland woods, and cool, deep shades and mellowing light. But it was also the voice that had accompanied her into the enchanted land on that winter's day when Thor had kissed her wrist. The day seemed now immeasurably far away in time, and the enchanted land had been left behind her; but the voice was still there, fluting, calling, reminding, entreating, with an insistence that almost made her weep.
She wrote hurriedly in postscript: "If there was ever anything I could do for you, dear Thor, perhaps what I used to feel would come back to me. If it only would! If I could only be great and generous and inexacting as you would be! I want to be, Thor darling; I long to be; but I am like a person paralyzed, whose limbs no longer answer to his will. I pray for recovery and restoration—but will it ever come?"
As encouragement to Thor she was no more satisfied with this than with what she had said earlier, but it expressed all she could allow herself to say. Anything more would have permitted him to infer such things as he had permitted her to infer, an accident that must have no repetition. She ended the note definitely, getting it ready for the post.