Now I must tell you something I have not mentioned to any one except Mrs. Timberlake, and I spoke of it to her only because she asked me a direct question. Something very unfortunate occurred here last winter, and Mrs. Timberlake told me yesterday that everybody in Richmond has been talking about it. As long as it is known so generally—and it appears that young Mrs. Colfax was the one to let it out—there can't be any harm in my writing frankly to you. I haven't the faintest idea how it all started, but one morning—it must have been two months ago—Mrs. Blackburn showed young Mrs. Colfax a bruise on her arm, and she either told her or let her think that it had come from a blow. Of course Mrs. Colfax inferred that Mr. Blackburn had struck his wife, and, without waiting a minute, she rushed straight out and repeated this to everybody she met. She is so amazingly indiscreet, without meaning the least harm in the world, that you might as well print a thing in the newspaper as tell it to her. No one knows how much she made up and how much Mrs. Blackburn actually told her; but the town has been fairly ringing, Mrs. Timberlake says, with the scandal. People even say that he has been so cruel to her that the servants heard her cry out in his study one afternoon, and that Alan Wythe, who was waiting in the drawing-room, ran in and interfered.
It is all a dreadful lie, of course—you know this without my telling you—but Mrs. Timberlake and I cannot understand what began it, or why Mrs. Blackburn deliberately allowed Daisy Colfax to repeat such a falsehood. Colonel Ashburton told Mrs. Timberlake that the stories had already done incalculable harm to Mr. Blackburn's reputation, and that his political enemies were beginning to use them. You will understand better than any one else how much this distresses me, not only because I have grown to like and admire Mr. Blackburn, but for Letty's sake also. As the child grows up this disagreement between her parents will make such a difference in her life.
I cannot tell you how I long to be back at The Cedars, now that spring is there and all the lilacs will so soon be in bloom. When I shut my eyes I can see you and the girls in the "chamber," and I can almost hear you talking about the war. I am not quite sure that I approve of Maud's becoming a nurse. It is a hard life, and all her beauty will be wasted in the drudgery. Diana's idea of going to France with the Y. M. C. A. sounds much better, but most of all I like Margaret's plan of canning vegetables next summer for the market. If she can manage to get an extra man to help Jonas with the garden—how would Nathan's son Abraham do?—I believe she will make a great success of it. I am so glad that you are planting large crops this year. The question of labour is serious, I know, but letting out so much of the land "on shares" has never seemed to turn out very well.
It must be almost eleven o'clock, and I have written on and on without thinking. Late as it is, I am obliged to run out to Peter's cottage by the stable and give his wife, Mandy, a hypodermic at eleven o'clock. She was taken very ill this morning, and if she isn't better to-morrow the doctor will take her to the hospital. I promised him I would see her the last thing to-night, and telephone him if she is any worse. She is so weak that we are giving her all the stimulants that we can. I sometimes wish that I could stop being a trained nurse for a time, and just break loose and be natural. I'd like to run out bareheaded in a storm, or have hysterics, or swear like Uncle George.
Dearest love,
CAROLINE.
When Caroline reached the cottage, she found Mandy in a paroxysm of pain, and after giving the medicine, she waited until the woman had fallen asleep. It was late when she went back to the house, and as she crossed the garden on her way to the terrace, where she had left one of the French windows open, she lingered for a minute to breathe in the delicious roving scents of the spring night. Something sweet and soft and wild in the April air awoke in her the restlessness which the spring always brought; and she found herself wishing again that she could cast aside the professional training of the last eight or nine years, and become the girl she had been at The Cedars before love had broken her heart. "I am just as young as I was then—only I am so much wiser," she thought, "and it is wisdom—it is knowing life that has caged me and made me a prisoner. I am not an actor, I am only a spectator now, and yet I believe that I could break away again if the desire came—if life really called me. Perhaps, it's the spring that makes me restless—I could never, even at The Cedars, smell budding things without wanting to wander—but to-night there is a kind of wildness in everything. I am tired of being caged. I want to be free to follow—follow—whatever is calling me. I wonder why the pipes of Pan always begin again in the spring?" Enchantingly fair and soft, beneath a silver mist that floated like a breath of dawn from the river, the garden melted into the fields and the fields into the quivering edge of the horizon. In the air there was a faint whispering of gauzy wings, and, now and then, as the breeze stirred the veil of the landscape, little pools of greenish light flickered like glow worms in the hollows.
"I hate to go in, but I suppose I must," thought Caroline, as she went up the steps. "Fortunately Roane is off after his commission, so they can't accuse me of coming out to meet him."
For the first time she noticed that the lights were out in the house, and when she tried the window she had left open, she found that someone—probably Patrick—had fastened it. "I ought to have told them I was going out," she thought. "I suppose the servants are all in bed, and if I go to the front and ring, I shall waken everybody." Then, as she passed along the terrace, she saw that the light still glimmered beneath the curtains of the library, where Blackburn was working late, and stopping before the window, she knocked twice on the panes.
At her second knock, she heard a chair pushed back inside and rapid steps cross the floor. An instant later the window was unbolted, and she saw Blackburn standing there against the lighted interior, with a look of surprise and inquiry, which she discerned even though his face was in shadow. He did not speak, and she said hurriedly as she entered,