“From your loving
“Bella.
“P. S. I wish you were here.”
It struck Hildegarde it was the first time she had said that since Jack had appeared on the scene.
The other letter was without date or beginning.
“Jack and I have quarreled. Oh, if you were here!
“Bella.”
Immediately after, a mysterious cable, that told simply the date of Bella’s homeward sailing. Had the quarrel frightened her lover and so hastened on the marriage? But no, for while Bella was still upon the sea came a formal notice that the marriage was “postponed.” It had been mailed some days before the cable was sent.
Hildegarde’s first feeling upon Bella’s return was that since the writing of that final note from London, and the dispatching of the postponement notice, the trouble, whatever it had been, was patched up. Impossible to think there was a cloud in her sky. Not matured at all; only a little thinner and, save for that, exactly the same Bella—“unthinking, idle, wild, and young.”