She went out on foot and entered the small telegraph office outside the railway station, for she could not have sent her message by a servant’s hand. She took the ink-crusted pen and a flimsy blank form, and thought of what she should say. The shabby young clerk at the little sliding window would have to read the telegram, and perhaps he knew her by sight. She thought a moment longer, and then wrote a few words:—
‘Impossible. If you really wish to help a person in great distress, be patient. Await letter.’
This looked very cold when it was written, but she thought it would do, and she felt sure that Castiglione would obey her request. At least, he could not leave Milan until he received the letter she was about to write to him.
It reached him on the following evening, and in the tender, beseeching words he read what was worse than a sentence of exile. But he submitted then, for it was as if she spoke to him, and he could hear every tone of her voice in the silence of his room. Since she had taken him back to her heart she dominated him by the nobility of her love, and by her touching trust in his. He read her letter twice, and then burnt it in the empty fireplace, carefully setting a second match to the last white shreds that showed at the edges of the thin black ashes.
‘You are a saint on earth,’ he said to her in his thoughts. ‘You are good enough to make a man believe in God.’
Perhaps he rose one step higher in that moment, for he was in earnest. But it had cost him much. For three days he had kept his valise packed and ready to start at any moment, and he saw it lying in a corner as he turned from the fireplace. Once again the strong temptation came upon him to take it and go downstairs. That would be the irrevocable step, for he knew well enough that if he went so far as that he would not turn back.
His big jaw thrust itself forward rather savagely as he crossed the room, picked up the valise, and set it on a chair to unpack it. When he had put his things away he threw it into a corner, lit a cigar, and sat down by the open window to watch the people in the broad street. He hoped that he might not think for a little while.
There was a knock at the door and his orderly came in with a telegram. He almost started at the sight of the brownish yellowish little square of folded paper in the man’s hand.
‘Join us at once to ride in military races on Thursday. War Office telegraphs order exchange to your colonel to-night. Make haste, in order to rest your horses. Welcome back to the regiment.—Casalmaggiore, Colonel.’