Both George and Nouna for a long time refrained from mentioning her mother’s name, and it was with some emotion that they both recognised her handwriting one day outside a letter directed to the husband, the postmark of which was Bath. George took it away to read, and Nouna made no remark, but when he came back to her, holding it open in his hand, he found that she was trembling with intense excitement. She took it from him with a passionately anxious glance, but gathered comfort from his gravely smiling face.
Nouna then read these words:
“My dear Mr. Lauriston,
“I am writing to make a request which I pray you will generously grant. I know there are differences between us which would make another meeting undesirable and perhaps painful to both, I would not suggest that we should see each other again: but I implore you to let me see my daughter just once more. Six months ago I could have claimed this as a right, or I would have contrived it by a trick. But I have learnt to respect you, and I only ask. I am a different woman, I have grown old, I am changed, you would not mind her coming now—I swear it. Lord F. has been very generous, and I want nothing but just one more look at my daughter. Let her come and see the Condesa di Valdestillas, that is the name I bear here, and shall bear to the end of my life. A foreign title covers whatever of eccentricity is left in
“Yours very sincerely,
“Lakshmi di Valdestillas.”
Nouna was crying quietly as she finished. She clung to her husband’s arm.
“Must I go?” she whispered.
“Oh, yes,” said George promptly. “She has always loved you, Nouna; I will write to tell her you are coming.”
“Oh, George, George,” panted the little creature in the same low voice, “I feel so wicked for not wanting to go! But all my heart has turned to you now, and I can’t get the old feeling back.”
He clasped his hands round her shoulders.
“But you will, Nounday, you will have just the feeling that is right when you see her all by herself, lonely, waiting for you whom she has always loved better than anything in the world.”
All the sting had now gone out of his feelings towards the creature who, with all her odd mixture of coarseness and refinement, corruption and generosity, had lived to see the very virtues she had fostered in her child turn against her in the loneliness of her premature age. For George had learnt from Lord Florencecourt, who ran down to Plymouth two or three times to see him and Nouna, to whom he was beginning to be reconciled, that Chloris White had indeed retired from her old life, broken up and suddenly middle-aged, and had fixed her retreat in the pretty old city of Bath, where she lived safe from recognition in a colony of what the Colonel irreverently called “old tabbies,” feeling neither contrition for the past nor discontent with the present, and passing her time, with a serenity born of dulled faculties and worn-out energies, in petty charities and petty scandal.