And when eventually the old ladies received the news of their fortune there was much rejoicing, and by following Cheiron's advice they were not defrauded and might look forward to a most comfortable end to their lives. Miss Roberta even dreamed of a villa at the seaside and a visit to London Town!
But meanwhile the Professor and Halcyone went back to London and on the Saturday left for Dieppe.
London, perhaps from her numbed state of misery, had said nothing to Halcyone. It remained in her memory as a nightmare, the scene of the confirmation of her winter of the soul. Its inhabitants were ghosts, the young men—jolly, hearty, young fellows from the Stock Exchange, and rising Radical politicians whom she had met—went from her record of things as so many shadows.
The vast buildings seemed as prisons, the rush and flurry as worrying storms, and even the parks as only feeble reminders of her dear La Sarthe Chase.
Nothing had made the least real impression upon her except Kensington Gardens, and they to the end of her life would probably be only a reminder of pain.
But her first view of the sea!
That was something revivifying!
Her memory of the one occasion when she had gone to Lowestoft with her mother was too dim to be anything of a reality, and, when they got to Newhaven, the Professor and Priscilla and she, with a brisk summer wind blowing the green-blue water into crested wavelets, the first cry of life and joy escaped her and gladdened Cheiron's heart.
How wonderful the voyage was! She took in every smallest change in the tones of the sky—she watched the waves from the forepart of the bridge, and some new essence of life and the certainty that her night forces would never desert her made themselves felt and cheered her.
Of John Derringham she thought constantly. He was not buried in that outer circle of oblivion from which the thoughts unconsciously shy—as we bury our dead, their going so shrouded in pain that we long to blot out the memory of them. John Derringham was always with her. She prayed for his welfare with the fervor and purity of her sweet soul. He was her spirit lover still. He could never really belong to any other woman, she knew. And as the days went by a fresh beauty grew in her pale face. The night sky itself seemed to be melted in her true eyes with the essence of all its stars.