Maisie opened her letter. And before she could even have had time to put up a hand to save herself, her Spanish castle was tumbling about her ears. A curious giddy feeling seemed to catch at the back of her neck, the room gave a sickening half-turn. She caught at her self-control.
“Not here. I mustn’t faint here. Not with his letter in my hand.”
She got out of the room somehow, and somehow she got into hat and jacket and boots, put her quarter’s salary in her purse, and walked out of the front door and straight down the great drive that she had come up four months ago with such bright hopes. She went to the station, and she took a train, and she never stopped nor stayed till she was at home again. She pushed past the frightened maid, and, pale and shabby, with black-ringed eyes and dusty black gown, she burst into her mother’s room. The scent of eau-de-Cologne and bees’-wax and buttered toast met her, and it was as the perfume of Paradise. Edward was there—but she was in no mood to bother about Edward. She threw herself on her knees and buried her face in the knitting on her mother’s lap, and felt thin arms go round her.
“It’s nothing. I’m tired of it all. I’ve come home,” was all she said. But presently she reached out a hand to Edward, and he took it and held it, as it were, absently, and the three sat by the fire and spoke little and were content.
To her dying day Maisie will never forget the sense of peace, of enfolding care, and love unchanging and unchangeable that came to her as she woke next morning to find her mother standing by her bed with a cup of tea in her hands.
“Oh, Mummy darling,” she cried, throwing her arms round her mother and nearly upsetting the tea, “I haven’t had a single drop of in-bed tea all the time I’ve been away!”
That was all she found words to tell her mother. Later there was Edward, and she told him most things, but, I imagine, not all. But the mother was content without spoken confidences. She knew that Maisie had suffered, and that now she had her little girl again, to wrap warm in her love as before. This was happiness enough.
This story, I know, is instructive enough for a Sunday School prize. It ought to be tagged at the end with a Moral. I can’t help it: it is true. Of course, it is not what usually happens. Many companions, no doubt, marry Honourable James’s, or even Dukes, and are never at all glad to get home to their mothers and their Edwards. But Maisie was different. She feels now a sort of grateful tenderness for Yalding Towers, because, but for the dream she dreamed there she might never have really awakened—never have known fully and without mistake what it was in life that she truly cared for. And such knowledge is half the secret of happiness. That, by the way, is really the moral of this story.