The address at the top of the letter was Number 439 West 19th Street--the same number in fact as Shrapp's Hotel; but of course Mrs. Westenra would not know this. She was to suppose it the number of the private house occupied by Mrs. Jane Seymour! No doubt Mr. John Seymour would be on the lookout for Mrs. Jane's correspondence!
This was the letter to which she now typed the following answer on her husband's typewriter:
"MADAME,--I beg to state that I can give you no information concerning the whereabouts of my late housemaid, Alice Brook. When I have once supplied a discharged servant with a formal reference, I feel that my responsibility to her is at an end. I must, therefore, request you to relieve me of all further inquiries upon a subject in which I have neither the time nor inclination to interest myself."
This missive, designedly as rude and arrogant as she knew how to make it, she signed with a hieroglyphic signature in which might be discovered after careful study some resemblance to "Anne Westenra" (her second name was Anne), but that was quite unlike any signature ever put on paper by Valentine Valdana.
In the end she almost spoiled all by one of those absent-minded mistakes that sometimes betray the best laid plots and plans. She addressed the envelope in her natural handwriting. She had stamped and closed it and risen to ring for Mary to take it to the letter-box at the end of the street (for since her rencontre with Valdana she had not dared go out), when, with her hand on the electric button, some bell in her brain rang a warning that something was wrong. She stared at the letter in her hand for a full minute before she recognised her bêtise, then the shock sent her back to her seat half fainting, pale as a witch.
"What an escape! What an escape!" she muttered with dry lips. "I must be going mad! My brain is giving way! Oh, if I had posted it!"
Valdana would have been quick to recognise her writing and see through the whole thing--that she was Mrs. Westenra. All would have been lost!
"But I would have torn down the letter-box--set fire to it--blown it up--rather than he should have got the letter," she muttered fiercely. In that moment she knew herself one of those who in the cause of love are capable of crime; that there was not anything she would not do to save her son from being branded illegitimate and Westenra from shame. But she was shaken to the depths by her narrow escape, and the thought that any moment her overtried brain might betray her. It was clear that she must depart as soon as possible from New York. Her presence there was a danger. The moment she reached England she could communicate with Valdana's mother, and once he found she had gone from America, he too would make for Europe.
From that day forward a gulf yawned between Westenra and his wife--a gulf into whose depths every sweet memory they had ever shared seemed to have disappeared. The only things that could have bridged it over were confidence and love, but he no longer believed in her love, and she could not give him her confidence. Desperate and dismayed, she saw the chasm widening day by day between them, but though her spirit held out arms to him imploring his love and belief in her loyalty, and in her eyes she could not quench the light of tenderness, she stayed firm to her purpose.
And Westenra felt the spirit arms entwining him, and saw the beacon in her eyes, and cursed her for a false trifler, a juggler with the arts and tricks of women. For when he approached her, lured by the beacon, she retreated, subtly intervening between them that sense of distance. And she was cold as death to his touch. Her hand, if he took it, lay like a stone in his, her lips eluded him. They were to all intents and purposes strangers to each other. She had never kissed him since he came back to the world of consciousness! What could he suppose but that her love for him was worn out.