“I will do my best to worry no more,” she said. “And will you help me?”
Her voice had a wonderful sweetness and tenderness about it. Violet got up too and stood close to her.
“Why, that’s charming of you,” she said. “I don’t think I could ever help anybody; but I will promise never to worry, if that is any use, Miss Wrexham.”
“The utmost use,” said Maud; “and I am not Miss Wrexham. I have left Miss Wrexham in London. I have done with her. May you never see her: she is a wicked little fool.”
“Well, Maud, then,” said the girl.
Maud woke next morning slowly and blissfully, conscious of a new interest in life, of a step taken. To be quit of London and all its fuss and worry was the step taken, but the new interest was the more vital of the two.
She and Violet had sat up late the night before talking, and Maud found something exquisitely sweet in being able to look at almost a facsimile of all that had made life bitter to her, to be able to talk and almost hear Tom answering, to be able to see his eyes looking into hers with affection and tenderness. For Maud had told Violet, without of course mentioning the name, the story of her worry and break-down; that she had loved a man and that he had married another, and that the desire of meeting him and the strain of doing so had made London unbearable and had affected her health.
Maud was one of those people who do not often make friends of their own sex, and the relief merely of telling some one about it was great. But when she felt she was almost telling it to Tom, as Violet sat opposite her, the bitterness and struggle she had been enduring so many months seemed quenched at last. Already her perplexities seemed capable of a solution which she could not have anticipated.
And the new interest was Violet. She felt as if Manvers had been wrong when he remarked cynically that Nature did not happen to have given us two people to love in case one got married. She felt as if she had almost cheated Fate, as if a substitute had been provided for her to love. “I shall be with her all day,” thought Maud, as she watched her maid moving about the room, “and I must, I will make her fond of me. If I can do that I shall feel as if at last Tom cared.”
Indeed this seemed no very hard task. Maud had a great power of attraction when she cared to attract, and she had already won Violet’s heart by her confidence of the night before. There is nothing so exquisite as to feel that one is trusted.