‘Gently, Amy; hush,’ said the mother, ‘Constance has more to tell.’
‘Yes,’ said Constance. ‘My friend, Rose Rollstone, who lives just by our house at Westhaven, and was going back to London the night that Mite was lost, wrote to me that she was sure she had seen his
face just then. She thought, and I thought it was one of those strange things one hears of sights at the moment of death. So I never told of it, but now I cannot help fancying—’
‘Oh! I am sure,’ cried Amice.
Lady Adela thought the only safe way would be to turn the two young creatures out to pour out their rapturous surmises to one another on the winding paths of the Malvern hills, and very glad was she to have done so, when by and by that other telegram was put into her hands.
Then, when Mary, unable to sit still, though with trembling limbs, came back to the sitting-room, with a flush on her pale cheek, excited by the sound at the door, Lady Adela pointed to the yellow paper, which she had laid within the Gospel, open at the place.
Mary sank into a chair.
‘It can’t be a false hope,’ she gasped.
‘He would never have sent this, if it were not a certainty,’ said Adela, kneeling down by her, and holding her hands, while repeating what Constance had said.
A few words were spent on wonder and censure on the girl’s silence, more unjust than they knew, but hardly wasted, since they relieved the tension. Mary slid down on her knees beside her friend, and then came a silence of intense heart-swelling, choking, and unformed, but none the less true thanksgiving, and ending in a mutual embrace and an outcry of Mary’s—