"Carissime..."
(2)
The actual writing of the letter to Tristram had not cost Horatia the effort that she had anticipated. She hardly felt, indeed, what she was renouncing, for everything was swallowed up in the sense of rest, a feeling that was partly a physical reaction, due to the intensity of the emotional strain of her interview with Dormer. She seemed to be floating in a sea of such mental and spiritual relief as she had not known for years. Such peace as she had compassed in the summer—she knew it now—had only been a drugged peace after all.
She had had to tell her father. That had not been easy. Yet she had, somehow, dominated his bitter disappointment. She did not show him Tristram's letter, but she did not keep from him the fact that she had been to Oriel. Perfectly calm, and not, apparently, in an exalted state, she yet produced on the Rector the impression of some change so profound as to make her seem another person. He was, if the truth be told, a little alarmed.
But it was the letter which, two days later, she was obliged to write to the Duchesse that really showed Horatia what she was losing. Madame de la Roche-Guyon had said that she should have her own establishment if she wished. It occurred to Horatia, rather bitterly, how much to be envied she would seem to her friends—young, titled, rich, her own mistress, with the entrée to the most exclusive society in the world; and yet—and yet, even with the child, all these advantages were as a pinch of dust. Better to be by Tristram's side in some tiny parsonage, in some dull village...
And when this really came home to her she suddenly threw down the pen and covered her face, an action which was the cause of the straggling blot on the page which, later, drew forth from the Duchesse strictures on the untidiness of the English.
But Horatia, neglecting the blot, took up the pen again and went on without flinching to the end. In spite of the sense of suffering, she had something which she had not before. For the first time in her life she could really pray. And already, on this and the days that followed, she had some inkling of what Dormer had meant, some taste of the peace that truly comes to the resigned will. In this ocean of rest she lived for some days, thinking sometimes how wonderful it was that it should have enclosed her, with all her turbulent desires, in so sudden a gentleness, but not unconscious that its waves broke quietly over a rock of regret.
(3)
"Darling, what are you doing?" she exclaimed, coming suddenly into the study, and surprising her father on his hands and knees on the hearthrug, surrounded by a medley of objects, and trying to stuff something into a large stocking—trying also, with incomplete success, to hide from her both stocking and litter.
"Well, my dear, Christmas will be upon us before very long, and I thought I would try whether they will go in," said the Rector, attempting to pull out the bulky object, which, having refused to enter the stocking now equally refused to be extracted.