Garda did not comply with the wish of her friends, and return to them. She wrote a dozen letters about it, but in actual presence she remained away. Most of these epistles were to Margaret. As time went on she wrote to Margaret every day.
But her letters were not letters at all, in the usual sense of the word; they were brief diaries, rapidly jotted down, of the feelings of the moment; they were pæans, rhapsodies, bubbling exclamations of delight; none of them ever exceeded in length a page.
They seemed to Margaret very expressive. She did not know what Garda might be writing to the Kirbys, the Moores, and Mrs. Carew; but what Garda wrote to her she kept to herself.
This was the girl's first letter after Margaret's note urging her to return:
"Margaret, I can't come—don't ask me; for none of them there would sympathize with me—not even you. It isn't that I want sympathy—I never even think of it. But I don't want the least disagreeable thing now when I am so blissful—bliss is the only word. Lucian comes in every morning on the train. The Doctor said that of course he would not stay all the time in Charleston. So to satisfy him Lucian stays four miles out.
"Oh, Margaret, everything is so enchanting!
"Garda."
"Dear Margaret,—Every morning I watch until he opens the gate" (she wrote a day later), "and then I run down to meet him in the hall. We don't stay in the house, we go into the garden. Mrs. Lowndes says she loves to have him come, because he reminds her so much of Mr. Lowndes—'Roger,' she calls him. And she says it makes her young again in her heart to see us. And perhaps it does in her heart, but the change hasn't reached the outside yet. I am expecting him every minute, there he comes now.
"Garda."
"Dear Margaret,—If I could stay with you, I would come back to-morrow," she wrote in answer to a second letter from Margaret, which urged her strongly to return. "But I know you don't want me now—that is, you can't have me—and where else could I stay? The Doctor hates Lucian—he may pretend, but he does. If I should stay at the rectory, Mrs. Moore would be sure to say, how pleasant for Lucian and I to read poetry on the veranda, because that is what she and Middleton used to do when they were engaged. But Lucian and I don't want to read any poetry on verandas.