Aimée burst into tears.
“Oh, Dolly, I did my best for you!” she said. “I did, indeed; but you must try to bear it, dear,—it is your own letter back again.”
Then the kneeling figure seemed to stiffen and grow rigid in a second. Dolly turned her deathly face, with her eyes aflame and dilated.
“Did he send it back to me?” she asked, in a slow, fearful whisper.
Her expression was so hard and dreadful a one that Aimée sprang to her side and caught hold of her.
“No,—no!” she said; “not so bad as that! He would never have done that. He has never had it. He has gone away; we don't know where. It came from the dead-letter office.”
Dolly took the letter from her and opened it slowly, and there, as she knelt, read it, word for word, as if it had been something she had never seen before. Then she put it back into the envelope and laid it down.
“A dead letter!” she said. “A dead letter! If he had sent it back to me, I think it would have cured me; but now there is no cure for me at all. If he had read it, he would have come,—if he had only read it; but it is a dead letter, and he is gone.”
There were no tears, the blow had been too heavy. It was only Aimée who had tears to shed, and it was Dolly who tried to console her in a strained, weary sort of way.
“Don't cry,” she said, “it is all over now. Perhaps the worst part of the pain is past. There will be no house at Putney, and the solitary rose-bush will bloom for some one else; they may sell the green sofa, now, as cheap as they will, we shall never buy it. Our seven years of waiting have all ended in a dead letter.”