Osborne Hotel, Torquay,
August 6th
Ma Petite Minerve-de-Mere: A hundred and six and a half thanks for your counsels and consolations. I needed both, and not a bit the less because I'm not unhappy now. I'm violently happy. It won't last, but I love it—this happiness. I keep it sitting on my shoulder and stroking its wings, so it mayn't remember when it's time to fly away.
That letter I wrote you was silly. I was a regular cry-baby to write it. But I'm so glad you answered quickly. I don't know how I should have borne it if the man at the Poste Restante window had said: "Nothing for you, miss." I might have responded with blows.
There was a letter from Ellaline, too. I'd sent her the "itinerary" as far as I knew it, and Torquay was the last place on the list. I was wondering if anything were the matter, but there isn't—though there is news. She waited to write, she says, so that her plans might be decided and she could tell them to me.
The military manœuvres go on; and the news has nothing directly to do with the adored Honoré. But Ellaline has made a confidante—a Scotch girl she has met. I don't mean she's told everything; far from that, apparently. She has kept the fraudulent part, about me, secret, and only confided the romantic part, about herself. What she says she has told is, that she's run away from cruel persons who want to have all her money, and to prevent her from having any happiness. That she's hiding till the man she's engaged to can take her to Scotland and have a Scotch marriage—at Gretna Green, if possible, because it would be romantic, and her mother was married there. The Scotch girl, with northern coldness of reason, has pointed out that Gretna Green is nowadays like any other place, but Ellaline is not weaned from the idea. She appears to have fascinated her new friend (as she did her old ones), in spite of the northern coldness, and has received a pressing invitation to visit at the girl's house in Scotland until Honoré can claim her.
There is a mother, as well as a girl, but only a stepmother, and apparently a detail; for the girl has the money and the strength of will. The two are stopping in a pension near Madame de Blanchemain's house. The girl is a Miss McNamarra, with freckles and no figure, but engaged to an officer, and consequently sympathetic. She has advised Ellaline that, if she travels from France to Scotland with Honoré, on the way to be married, he mayn't respect her as much as if she had friends and chaperons, and a nice place to wait for him. Ellaline is too French at heart not to feel that this advice is good—though she adds in her letter that she, of course, trusts darling Honoré completely;—so she has accepted the invitation.
The only trouble is, she wants more money at once. She must let golden louis run through her fingers like water, for I sent her nearly all Sir Lionel handed me before we started on the trip. I shall have to ask him for more, and I'll hate doing that, because, though I shall be gone out of his life so soon, I'm too vain and self-conscious (it must be that!) to like making a bad impression on his mind while we're together.
I shan't hate it as much, however, as I should, supposing that something which happened last night hadn't happened. I'm coming to that part presently. It's the thing that's made me happy—the thing that won't last long.
We left adorable little Sidmouth days ago—I almost forget how many, coming as far as Exeter along a lovely road. But then, everything is lovely in Devonshire. It is almost more beautiful than the New Forest, only so different that, thank goodness, it isn't necessary to compare the two kinds of scenery.