But she made no further mention of Paul Hallam. There were a dozen questions she would have liked to ask, but she forbore. It was not fair to attempt to force the girl’s confidence; her very reluctance to speak of this acquaintance proved that there was more in it than she allowed, perhaps more than she yet realised.
There followed days of restlessness and alternating moods more fitful than any barometer. Sinclair called, and made himself so agreeable to Rose and the children, and was so markedly attentive to Esmé that Rose found herself wishing that this quite eligible and agreeable young man was the object of her sister’s interest, as he unmistakably desired to be.
Esmé was pleased to see him again; but her manner towards him showed no particular partiality. It was certainly not George Sinclair, Rose decided, who was responsible for the change in the girl.
Sinclair called frequently after that first visit, and speedily became on very friendly terms with the family. He found a staunch ally in Rose, who, considering the other affair too remote to be serious, saw in Sinclair an eventual safety-valve for her sister’s repressed emotions. Repressed emotion was undesirable; it hid like a morbid germ in the brain cells and worked with insidious effect upon the mind. In Esmé it betrayed itself in unexpected bursts of irritability, as her discontent with things grew. Mainly this was the result of reaction, and was but a phase in the cure of which Sinclair aided unconsciously. His visits made a break in the general monotony.
And then one day a letter came for Esmé. Rose took it in. It was directed in the same small untidy handwriting which she remembered vividly seeing on the front page of the book in Esmé’s room. She had looked for that book often since but she had never seen it again. Now, with the letter in her hand, her thoughts went back to that little scene in the bedroom, and her brows knitted themselves in a frown. Paul Hallam had broken the silence and written to the girl. She carried the letter up to Esmé’s room and laid it on the table beside her bed.
“Poor George!” she reflected. “This puts him out of the picture anyway.”
Then she went downstairs and left it to the girl to make her own discovery on her return.
The first thing which Esmé’s eyes rested on when she ran up to her room on getting back from the college where she gave music lessons was the letter lying on her table. She stood for a full minute looking down at it with pleased, amazed eyes and a deepening colour in her cheeks; then she reached forth shyly and took it up.
“I wonder how he learned my address?” was the thought in her mind.
She had not seen him copy it from the label on her suit-case. He had taken that precaution when the luggage was being placed in the cart.