It was nearly one o'clock on Sunday morning. The torn sheets of at least twenty letters in Ronnie's tiny legal handwriting littered his sitting-room grate. He reread the last of them; and thinking how utterly it failed to express his yearning, added as postscript, "I love you." Then he addressed his envelope; folded the single sheet; thrust it in; and gummed down the flap. The fragments in the fireplace he gathered up very carefully, and kindled to ashes.
As yet no sorrow for his quarrel with Julia had entered into her son's heart. He could see her only as an obstacle between himself and happiness. Of her last word, he could not bring himself to think sanely. That she, his own mother, the one person on whose help he ought to have been able to rely, should be the first to cast a stone at the woman he loved, seemed to him--in his bitterness--to make her his chiefest enemy; no longer "the mater," no longer "the lonely old lady," but "Julia Cavendish," publicly and in private the upholder of an effete religion, the champion of fust-ridden prudery.
No longer could he sympathize with that religious prudery. Passion, not the physical desires of a Brunton, but the grand passion, the passion of the poets, blinded him--for the nonce--to every point of view except his own. He and Aliette loved each other. To the torture, then, with whosoever loved other gods!
Passing, on his way downstairs, the door of the bachelor-flat beneath him, Ronnie heard, very low but quite distinct, a woman's laughter. "And that sort of thing," he thought angrily, "is what one is allowed to do. Moses Moffatt winks at it. The world winks at it. Meanwhile the women who won't stoop to concealment foot the world's social bill."
But the woman's laughter still echoed in his ears as he slid his letter into the mouth of the pillar-box.
2
Caroline Staley brought Ronnie's letter, the only one of Monday's post, on Aliette's breakfast-tray. The handwriting of the envelope was strange; but instinct warned her from whom it came. Her heart fluttered--breathlessly--under the satin bath-robe as she said, "I'll ring when I'm ready to dress, Caroline."
But once alone, Aliette did not dare touch the envelope. Casting thought back, she knew that she had loved Ronnie from first sight. Suppose--suppose he had written to make an end?
The breakfast on the tabled tray cooled and cooled. Through the curtained alcove came sound of a housemaid emptying her bath, polishing at the taps. Aliette heard nothing, saw nothing. The cheerful yellow-and-white of her bedchamber had gone dark about her, as though a cloud obscured the sun outside.