"Take care of yourself, my love," he had said, as he looked in at her door, "and write to me this afternoon as to what train you decide to leave by on Thursday."
She promised she would, and he departed, thoroughly satisfied with his visit among the great world.
The day was spent as the other days, and after lunch Theodora escaped to her room. She must write her letter to Josiah for the afternoon's post. She had discovered the train left at eleven o'clock. It did not take her long, this little note to her husband, and then she sat and stared into space for a while.
The terrible reaction had begun. There was no more excitement, only the flatness, the blank of the days to look forward to, and that unspeakable sense of loss and void. And oh, she had let Hector go without one word of her passionate love! She had been too unnerved to answer him when he had said his last good-bye to her in the wood.
She seized the pen again which had dropped from her hand. She would write to him. She would tell him her thoughts—in a final farewell. It might comfort him, and herself, too.
So she wrote and wrote on, straight out from her heart, then she found she had only just time to take the letters to the hall.
She closed Hector's with a sigh, and picking up Josiah's, already fastened, she ran with them quickly down the stairs.
There was an immense pile of correspondence—the accumulation of Whitsuntide.