“I can say I have a nervous headache,” she said to Aimée. “Nervous headaches are useful things.”
“If a letter comes,” said Aimée, “I will bring it to you myself.”
The girl turned toward her suddenly, her eyes hard and bright and her mouth working.
“I have had my last letter,” she said. “My last letters came to me when Grif laid that package upon the table. He has done with me.”
“Done with you?” cried Aimée, frightened by her manner. “With you, Dolly?”
Then for the first time Dolly flushed scarlet to the very roots of her hair.
“Yes,” she said, “he has done with me. If there had been half a chance that he would ever come near me again, the letter I wrote to him that night would have brought him. A word of it would have brought him,—the first word. But he is having his revenge by treating it with contempt. He is showing me that it is too late, and that no humility on my part can touch him. I scarcely could have thought that of him,” dropping into a chair by the toilet-table and hiding her face in her hands.
“It is not like Grif to let me humble myself for nothing. And I did humble myself,—ah, how I did humble myself! That letter,—if you could have seen it, Aimée,—it was all on fire with love for him. I laid myself under his feet,—and he has trodden me down! Grif—Grif, it was n't like you,—it was n't worthy of you,—it was n't indeed!”
Her worst enemy would have felt herself avenged if she had heard the anguish in her voice. She was crushed to the earth under this last great blow of feeling that he had altered so far. Grif,—her whilom greatest help and comfort,—the best gift God had given her! Dear, old, tender, patient fellow! as she had been wont to call him in her fits of penitence.
Grif, whose arms had always been open to her at her best and at her worst, who had loved her and borne with her, and waited upon her and done her bidding since they were both little more than children. When had Grif ever turned from her before? Never. When had Grif ever been cold or unfaithful in word or deed? Never. When had he ever failed her? Never—never—never—until now! And now that he had failed her at last, she felt that the bitter end had come. The end to everything,—to all the old hopes and dreams, to all the old sweet lovers' quarrels and meetings and partings, to all their clinging together, to all the volumes and volumes of love and trust that lay in the past, to all the world of simple bliss that lay still unrevealed in their lost future, to all the blessed old days when they had pictured to each other what that future was to be. It had all gone for nothing in the end. It must all have gone for nothing, when Grif—a new Grif—not her own true, stanch, patient darling—not her own old lover—could read her burning, tender, suffering words and pass them by without a word of answer. And with this weight of despair and pain upon her heart, she went back to the wearisome routine of Brabazon Lodge,—went back heavy with humiliation and misery which she scarcely realized,—went back suffering as no one who knew her—not even Grif himself—could ever have understood that it was possible for her to suffer. No innocent coquetries now, no spirit, no jests; for the present at least she had done with them, too.