"There wasn't a word about it in the letter. She wrote because she wanted me to send her some summer clothes she had left here, and then she asked me to let her know about Letty. She said she had been operated on in Chicago a month ago, and that she was just out of the hospital, and feeling like the wreck of herself. Everybody told her, she added, how badly she looked, and the letter sounded as if she were very much depressed and out of sorts."

"Do you think she may really have cared for Mr. Wythe?"

Mrs. Timberlake shook her head. "It wasn't that, my dear. She just couldn't bear to think of Mary's having more than she had. If she had ever liked David, it might have been easier for her to stand it, but she never liked him even when she married him; and though a marriage may sometimes manage very well without love, I've yet to see one that could get along without liking."

She rose as Letty came back from her errand, and a minute or two later, Caroline tucked the child in the car, and stood watching while it started for Briarlay.

The air was mild and fragrant, for after the hard, cold winter, spring had returned with a profusion of flowers. In the earth, on the trees, and in the hearts of men and women, April was bringing warmth, hope, and a restoration of life. The will to be, to live, and to struggle, was released, with the flowing sap, from the long imprisonment of winter. In the city yards the very grass appeared to shoot up joyously into the light, and the scent of hyacinths was like the perfume of happiness. The afternoon was as soft as a day in summer, and this softness was reflected in the faces of the people who walked slowly, filled with an unknown hope, through the warm sunshine.

"Love is the greatest good in the world, but it is not the only good," repeated Caroline, wondering who had first said the words.

It was then, as she turned back to enter the hospital, that the postman put some letters into her hand, and looking down, she saw that one was from Blackburn.

CHAPTER XI
The Letter

FOR the rest of the afternoon she carried the letter hidden in her uniform, where, from time to time, she could pause in her task, and put her hand reassuringly on the edge of the envelope. Not until evening, when she had left her patient and was back in her room, did she unfold the pages, and begin slowly to read what he had written. The first sentences, as she had expected, were stiff and constrained—she had known that until he could speak freely he would speak no word of love to her—but, as soon as he had passed from the note of feeling to the discussion of impersonal issues, he wrote as earnestly and spontaneously as he had talked to Sloane on that October afternoon at Briarlay. Another woman, she realized, might have been disappointed; but the ironic past had taught her that emotion, far from being the only bond with a man like Blackburn, was perhaps the least enduring of the ties that held them together. His love, if it ever came to her, would be the flower, not of transient passion, but of the profound intellectual sympathy which had first drawn their minds, not their hearts, to each other. Both had passed through the earlier fires of racial impulse; both had been scorched, not warmed by the flames; and both had learned that the only permanent love is the love that is rooted as deeply in thought as in desire.

In France.