And now, by no means for the first time, a great longing came over Lucy to see Glynne Day again. She knew that the family had been for a year and a half in Italy, and only heard by accident that they had returned to Brackley, so quietly was everything arranged. Then, as the days glided by, and she heard no more news, the longing to see Glynne again intensified.
She felt the tears come into her eyes and trickle down her cheeks as she thought of the terrible catastrophe—never even alluded to at The Firs—a horror which had saved her from being Rolph’s wife, but at what a cost!
“Poor Moray!” she sighed more than once in her solitary communings. “Poor Glynne! and they might have been by now happy husband and wife. It is too horrible—too dreadful. How could Fate be so cruel!”
Lucy shivered at times as she mentally called up the careworn, beautiful, white face of her old friend, who had never been seen outside the walls of the house, so far as she could learn, since her return. And at last, trembling the while, as if her act were a sin, instead of true womanly love and charity, she wrote a simple little letter to Glynne, asking to see her, for that she loved her very dearly, and that the past was nothing to them, and ought not to separate two who had always been dear friends.
She posted the letter secretly, feeling that mother and brother would oppose the act, and that day the rustic postman was half-a-crown the richer upon his promising to retain and deliver into her own hands any letter addressed to her which might arrive.
Then she waited patiently for days in the grim, cheerless home, where her brother seemed to be settling down into a thoughtful, dreamy man, who was ageing rapidly, and whose eyes always looked full of some terrible trouble, which was eating away his life, while, if possible, Mrs Alleyne looked older, thinner, and more careworn than of yore.
Oldroyd came at intervals professionally, but there was a peculiar distance observed between him and Lucy, who treated him with petulant angry resentment, and he was reserved and cold.
But his visits did no good. There were no walks with the doctor, no garden flowers bloomed at the astronomer’s touch. Alleyne studied harder than ever, and his name rose in reputation among the scientific, but he received no visitors, paid no calls, and only asked for one thing from those of his household—to be let alone.
A week had elapsed before the postman, with a great deal of mysterious action, slipped a note into Lucy’s hand, making her run to her room trembling and feeling guilty, to hold the letter open, illegible for the tears which veiled her eyes.
At last, though, she read the few brief lines which it contained:—