“He will think that you have been a true friend to me,” said her sister. “He will love you for it when—when he understands. Ah! but we are on forbidden ground again.”
Edith paused.
“I remember once talking to you about Hugh’s first appearance in town,” she said. “I told you then that if he failed, which was impossible, I should not be sorry, because I would have to comfort him again, and make him happy. Well, that is closer to me now. When I tell him what Sir Thomas told me yesterday he will want that comfort. But now he will really want it, for I am more to him than his art.”
Edith gently smoothed the sofa cushion beside her.
“I am—I really am!” she said.
. . . . . . . .
The dressing-gong sounded sonorously and its echoes died into silence.
CHAPTER XV
EDITH finished writing the words “gigantic success,” and then laid down her pen, having filled the very small space allotted to correspondence on a picture postcard that bore on its back a highly-coloured view of the opera-house in Munich, and on the space allotted to the address the name of Peggy. Then she tore it up. She wanted to say more than that to Peggy, and though she was tired, she felt she must write her a letter which should give her in less meagre quantity (and in quality things more private than could be sent face upward through Europe) some little impression of the week that had elapsed since she left England. And in order to do that she found that she must arrange and sound her thoughts and her memory, for she had lived simply from the minute to the minute, enjoying each to the uttermost, yet somehow not grudging their passage, for each was sufficient in itself.