I must not, moreover, be laid further under obligations of gratitude, the less, my dear Aurora, that gratitude is not precisely what I feel. No. I so little dote upon life that I should be glad if a merciful angel’s attention had not been drawn to me, and I perhaps might have escaped the dreary prolongation of years. I am sorry, but so it is.
Pray do not conceive any relation between what I have just written and the request that follows. Will you be so 312kind as to return the object belonging to me which I miss from the little table-drawer at the head of my bed? You had no right to take it.
Vincent Johns is coming in a day or two. Do not think of me, therefore, as lonely or neglected.
I find I must hurry or be too late. This letter is beastly and ought to be torn up like the others. It simply cannot; it must go. I can only pray, Aurora, that you will understand.
Aurora went back to the beginning and read the letter a second time. Then she turned to the accompanying parcel and noticed that it was done up in a shabby piece of old newspaper. It contained a pair of fur-lined velvet shoes, a bow-knot of blue satin ribbon, and a bottle of almond milk, things of her own which through carelessness had been left behind. She could not know that the honest Giovanna alone was responsible for this return of her property. Coming at that moment, it formed the occasion for two stinging tears rising to the edge of Aurora’s eyes. She swept them away with the back of her glove, and forbade any more to follow. To prevent them she took her lips between her teeth, and with all her strength called upon her pride.
She read Gerald’s letter over again, really trying to understand, to be fair, to interpret it in the high-minded way he would wish.
“When all is said, it amounts to this,”–she reached the end of that exercise by a short cut,–“he wants to be let alone.”
And after every allowance had been made for him, and all due deference paid to his excellent reasons, still it 313seemed to her what she couldn’t call anything but a poor return. Because his letter was bound to hurt her, and he must have known it. His sending it, therefore, argued a lack of any very deep affection for her. After she had come, just from his own words and actions, to supposing....
“This is what you get for not remembering that if a person is practically a foreigner you can never expect to know them except in spots,” she admonished herself.