Through One Administration

by Frances Hodgson Burnett

"Do you want it? It is only a yellow scrap of paper."

"I think it belongs to me," he said. "I have a right to it."

She got up without a word and went toward the house, leading Meg by the hand. Tredennis watched her retreating figure in silence until she went in at the door. His face set, and his lips pressed together, then he flung himself backward and lay at full length again, seeing only the bright green of the leaves and the bits of intense blue between. It was well that he was alone. His sense of impotent anguish was more than he had strength to bear, and it wrung a cry from him.

"My God!" he said; "my God!" He was still lying so when Bertha returned. She had not been away many minutes, and she came back alone with the unfinished letter in her hand.

He took it from her without comment, and looked at it. The faint odor of heliotrope he knew so well floated up to him as he bent over the paper. As she had said, there were only a few lines, and she had evidently been dissatisfied with them, and irresolute about them, for several words were erased as if with girlish impatience. At the head of the page was written first: Dear Philip, and then Dear Captain Tredennis, and there were two or three different opening sentences. As he read each one through the erasures, he thought he understood the innocent, unconscious appeal in it, and he seemed to see the girl-face bending above it, changing from eagerness to uncertainty, and from uncertainty to the timidity which had made her despair.

"I wish you had finished it," he said.

"I wish I had," she answered, and then she added vaguely, "if it would have pleased you."

He folded it, and put it in his breast-pocket and laid down once more, and it was not referred to again.

It seemed to Tredennis, at least, that there never before had been such a day as the one which followed. After a night of rain the intense heat subsided, leaving freshness of verdure, skies of the deepest, clearest blue, and a balmy, luxurious sweetness in the air, deliciously pungent with the odors of cedar and pine.

When he came down in the morning, and entered the breakfast room, he found it empty. The sunlight streamed through the lattice-work of vines, and the cloth was laid, with the pretty blue cups and saucers in waiting; but Bertha was not there, and, fancying she had risen later than usual, he went out into the open air.