Mrs. Timberlake pondered the question. "No, I don't believe that she can, but she can make him feel sorry for her, and with David that would be half the battle."
"That and Letty, I suppose."
"Yes, she has been writing to Letty very often, and her letters are so sweet that the child has begun to ask when she is coming home. You know how easily children forget?"
Caroline sighed under her breath. "Oh, I know—but, even then, how could Mr. Blackburn?"
"He wouldn't forget. If he thought it was right, he would do it if it killed him, but he would remember till his dying day. That's how David is made. He is like a rock about his duty, and I sometimes think feelings don't count with him at all."
"Yet he did love her once."
"Yes, he loved her once—and, of course," she amended suddenly, reverting to the traditional formula, "Nobody believes that Angelica ever did anything really wrong."
For the rest of the long drive they sat in silence; and it seemed to Caroline, while the car turned into the lane and ran the last half mile to the house, that time had stopped and she was back again in the October afternoon when she had first come to Briarlay. It was no longer a hundred years ago. In the midst of the June foliage—the soft green of the leaves, the emerald green of the grass, the dark olive green of the junipers—in the midst of the wonderful brightness and richness of summer—she was enveloped, as if by a drifting fragrance, in the atmosphere of that day in autumn. It came to life not as a memory, but as a moment that existed, outside of time, in eternity. It was here, around, within, and above her, a fact like any other fact; yet she perceived it, not through her senses, but through an intuitive recognition to which she could not give a name. Under the summer sky she saw again the elm leaves falling slowly; she approached again the red walls in the glimmer of sunset; and she felt again the divine certainty that the house contained for her the whole measure of human experience. Then the car stopped; the door opened; and the scene faded like the vision of a clairvoyant. Imagination, nothing more! She had stepped from the dream into the actuality, and out of the actuality she heard Mrs. Timberlake's dry tones remarking that David had not come home from the office.
"Let me go to Letty. I should like to see Letty at once," said Caroline.
"Then run straight upstairs to the night nursery. I know she will be almost out of her head with joy."