When he looked up the white dawn was beginning to struggle with the darkness. Gray clouds and intermediate patches of pale blue had become visible, and heavy, bead-like drops of dew stood on the blades of grass. His face was wan, like that of one who had passed through a death-agony, but it looked better. He rose to his feet and paced slowly back to the town. At the railway-station he stopped, knocked up a telegraph-clerk, and sent a message apparently to London, then returned to his room at the hotel, arousing the astonishment of two or three sleepy waiters who were up in expectation of an early train.
There he sat down before the table, opened his desk and taking from it a sheet of paper began a letter. It seemed a difficult one to write, for sheet after sheet was destroyed before he could satisfy himself. It was accomplished at last, however, and the words written seemed to be very few, but a smile flitted over his face as he read them. Then he pressed the paper to his lips, enclosed it in an envelope, and wrote the address with a trembling hand.
L'Estrange's method of spelling English words was very eccentric. He could speak the language well enough, as he had lived long in England, but he could never bring himself to write it. Why words should be spelt in such an arbitrary way he could not or would not understand. All he could suppose was that the English would keep in this, as in everything else, to their national characteristic of eccentricity.
English eccentricity had always been a fruitful theme with L'Estrange. On the point of spelling he was obstinate. He persisted in spelling phonetically, and as a natural consequence his letters very often went astray.
It will be as well to say at once that this was the unhappy fate of the letter in which his mental struggles culminated. It was written in French and addressed to Margaret. She never got it. Three weeks later, after vain endeavors had been made to procure it some destination, it was returned to the hotel from which it had been written. There it awaited the return of its writer.
[CHAPTER II.]
A WASTED LIFE.
A glorious Devil, large in heart and brain,
That did love Beauty only (Beauty seen
In all varieties of mould and mind),
And Knowledge for its beauty; or if Good,
Good only for its beauty, seeing not
That Beauty, Good and Knowledge are three sisters
That doat upon each other—friends to man,
Living together under the same roof,
And never can be sundered without tears.
The heavy rings round Laura's eyes and her general languor when she appeared in the private sitting-room her protector had taken deeply grieved him.