And now she thought of him lying alone among the strange trees—the mighty broad-leaved palms, the enormous ropes of the trailing plants falling around him. Was he thinking of the English home which he had forsaken, but which was waiting for him? How often had not he found comfort in the midst of his desolation through picturing the garden at The Knoll, as he had walked in it on those summer nights long ago?
Alas! alas! With his thoughts of the old garden and the old times there must have come that terrible thought which he had hinted at in his letter—the thought that she had been unfaithful to him. Ah, how could he ever have had such a thought? She had heard of fickle women—loving a man passionately one day, and the next carried away by the glamour of a new face and a changed voice—but how could he fancy for a moment that she was such a woman?
Thus she sat, with her thoughts and her memories and her anticipations, until the full moon had arisen behind the trees of Westwood Court and was flooding the sky with light and sending the great shadows of the elm far over the lawn. When the sound of the striking of the church clock roused her from her reverie, she was conscious of one thought: that the pang that must have been his when he wrote that postscript would soon pass away in the joy of knowing that she had been true to him.
But it was a long time before she went to sleep that night.
CHAPTER XII.
It had fallen to her lot to write to Claude Westwood the letter which told him of the death of the brother to whom he had all his life been devoted. She knew that a telegraphic message had been sent to the Consul at Zanzibar respecting the death of Richard Westwood, the day after the news of the safety of Claude had reached England, so that he would not receive the first shock of the terrible news from her. She had done her best in her letter to comfort him—indeed, every word that it contained was designed to be a consolation to him. Why, the very sight of her writing would make him feel that his grief was shared by at least one friend.
The letter had not, of course, been written in the strain of the letters which she had sent to him during the first few months after his arrival in Africa. (Some of them had been returned to her from Zanzibar with the inscription “Not found” on the covers.) She thought that any of the rapturous phrases, which could give but very inadequate expression to what was in her heart, would be out of place in a letter that she meant to be expressive only of the deep sympathy she felt for him.
But the following week she had written to him something of what was in her heart, She had taken up once more the strain of that correspondence which had been so rudely interrupted, and had wondered to find how easily the unaccustomed words of endearment slipped from her pen. It seemed to her that her love had been accumulating in her heart through all the years of her enforced silence, for she had never before written to him such phrases of affection. When she had written that letter she had a sense of relief beyond expression. The pent-up flood had at last found a vent. She gave a great sigh as she signed, not her own name, but the pet name which he had given her—a great sigh, and then a laugh of delight.