Flora recognized the impulse that sought to inflict a scratch, where Mrs. Carey’s self-revelation had left her vanity disturbed with the instinctive fear that she had not been taken at her own valuation.
She said good-bye to her.
“I’ll let you know what happens,” Mrs. Carey promised. “I feel you really do care, you know. I shall think of you when I’m taking that horrid journey tonight all the way to Scotland. Perhaps I really will settle down there, if Fred is willing to make it up, and if he lets me have a decent allowance, and part of the year over here.”
She no longer looked desperate, and she bent over the banisters and waved to Flora with the little handkerchief that was still drenched by the tears she had been shedding.
Flora did not suppose that she should ever hear from her. Impressions made upon Mrs. Carey seemed to be transient affairs.
She was conscious of nothing so much as of extreme physical fatigue, and the intense relief of her new certainty that David had not, after all, sought the last desperate remedy. She could be certain of that, now.
“Perhaps Owen won’t understand why I’m so positive of that now,” she reflected. “But after all, I knew David. She counted on him, and he’d promised to marry her. David would never have failed her deliberately—it wasn’t in him. And he was taken away from committing a frightful sin. Besides, who knows how much he repented, poor boy?”
Within a few yards of the hotel, Flora met Quentillian.
He turned and accompanied her to the door.
“David didn’t take his own life, Owen. It was what they said—he must have been taken ill suddenly.”