We needn’t worry, however, I think. Even such an outbreak would in all probability turn out well. Every storm passes, you know; and when the clouds clear away, the skies are all the bluer for it. When a man and a woman love each other and don’t know it, or don’t let each other know it, any sort of crisis, any sort of emotional collision, is apt to bring about a favourable result.
Evelyn spent that evening in her room, writing incessantly, far into the night.
She wrote a letter to Kilgariff. When she read it over, she tore it up.
“It reads as if I were angry,” she said to herself, “and anger is not exactly what I feel. I wonder what I do feel.”
Then she wrote another letter to Kilgariff, and put it aside, meaning to read it after a while. In the meantime she wrote long and lovingly to Dorothy, telling her she had decided not to return to Wyanoke, but to go to Petersburg instead, and help in nursing the soldiers.
When she had read that letter over, she was wholly unsatisfied with it. Written words are apt to mean so much more or so much less than is intended. She put it aside and took up the one to Kilgariff. As she read it, it seemed even more unsatisfactory than the first.
“It is too humble in parts, and too proud in parts,” she thought.
Again she set to work and wrote both letters once more. The result was worse than before. The letters seemed to ring with a false note, and above all things she was determined to meet this crisis in her life with absolute truth and candour. Besides, she not only wanted to utter her thought to Kilgariff—she wanted to hear what he might have to say in reply, and she wanted to see his face as he spoke, reading there far more important things than any that he could put into a letter.
Suddenly she realised that she was very cold. The weather was growing severe now, and in her preoccupation she had neglected her fire until it had burned down to a mass of slowly expiring coals.