Stanief picked it up, himself confronted by the unexpected. Allard resumed his seat and averted his head as the rustling paper unfolded.
It was a sweetly calm letter, a letter written by one in the evening of life and itself breathing an evening repose and gray twilight hush. Across the fevered passion of the man who read, the first words drifted like the cool, scented air of the Californian garden from which they came. A letter that neither reproached nor questioned, its message was given with all tenderness of phrase and household name.
Robert had not been well for a long time, Aunt Rose wrote most delicately. After John had left for South America so suddenly, his younger brother had fretted and chafed against his own quiet life. Even his engagement to Theodora had failed to cheer him, or cure his strange restlessness and abstraction. About six months after John's departure, he had been found unconscious on the veranda, lying among the crumpled newspapers. An illness followed, and after recovering from that he never seemed to grow quite strong. In the third year of John's absence, when preparations were being made for the long-delayed wedding, he again fell ill. The morning they received John's letter from the Nadeja, he rallied wonderfully. Asking to have the letter himself, he read it again and again, then sent them all away while he rested. An hour later they had found him, resting indeed, his cheek upon the letter and the old bright content on his boyish face. Theodora had borne it very well. They were tranquilly calm in their life together, now, and sent their earnest love to John in the distant life he had chosen.
Stanief laid down the letter very gently. He never forgot how the light from this purer and simpler world fell across the labyrinth of dark thoughts at which he scarcely dared look back.
"Nearly two years," Allard said, his head still turned away. "So long since Robert died. I did not write at once from here; I thought they knew of me, and I wanted a little real life to tell. I was sick of pretense. I suppose the women did not know how to reach me here; Bertie would have had no difficulty. But it was a grief past remedying, and there seemed no use troubling you."
Stanief rose and came around the writing-table to lay both hands on the other's shoulders.
"I beg your pardon, John," he said earnestly and gravely. "I spoke to you just now as I never will again, come what may. I have my own griefs, less patiently endured than yours; and I misunderstood."
"I did not notice," Allard answered, with perfect truth. "You are always like no one else, monseigneur. I am glad that you know, very glad. You see, it is not only that I myself have lost Robert, but that I have taken him from Theodora. I wanted so much happiness for her, and now—it was all wrong. Let us talk of something else, please."
Stanief turned away to the table.
"My last cigarette was never lighted," he remarked, the change of tone complete. "Did you not see that particularly disagreeable fellow-countryman of mine who went out in Dimitri's charge? He tried to kill me just before you arrived."