“Yes, yes, that’s even more what I mean. Then comes the fact that we saw so little of her. What did she do with her time? Writing The Resting-place, was her explanation, but—is that gospel? Do you really believe that she sat at home writing and dreaming all those long summer days and nights, except when she was—eating buttercups—with Carey and her chaperons? And then comes The Resting-place with its appalling falling-off, and following on that, this letter, this sudden engagement. Now doesn’t it look—I ask you, doesn’t it look as if something had been going on behind all our backs and had at last come to a head?”
“Oh, that she was in love is certain,” said Mr. Flood. “Was there ever a woman of genius who wasn’t?”
“Exactly. It’s a moral certainty. And this letter to me proves that, whoever it was, it wasn’t Carey. ‘I think we shall be happy.’ ‘I hope you will like him.’ Is that the way a woman writes of her first love or her first lover?”
“Oh, but that sentence just before——” the Baxter girl stretched out her hand for the letter—“‘The bush that bears my flower——’” She spoke sympathetically; but it jarred me. I wondered how I should feel if I thought that the Baxter girl would ever read my letters aloud.
“Ah, that’s the literary touch. Madala could never resist embroideries. Besides—she wants to confuse me. That means nothing. But here, you, see——” she took the letter out of the Baxter girl’s hand—“as soon as she comes to the point, the real point, the confession, the apologia—then the baldest sentences. Try to remember that Madala Grey has written one of the strongest love scenes of the decade, and all she can say of the man she is to marry is—‘I hope you will like him.’”
“H’m! It’s curious!” Miss Howe was frowning.
“Isn’t it? And then you know, the whole manner of the engagement was so unlike her usual triumphant way. She always swept one along, didn’t she? But in the matter of the marriage she seems, as far as I can make out, to have been perfectly passive. She left everything to the man—arrangements—furniture—I imagine she even bought her clothes to please him. And the wedding itself—no reception, no presents, no notice to anyone, so sudden, so private. Not a word even to her oldest friends——”
Great-aunt stirred in her corner.
“—there was something so furtive about it all: as if she were running away from something.”
Miss Howe sat up.