"I should think it might be managed," he said. "Fire in an application and I'll put it up to-morrow."
"Thanks," said Vane briefly, "I will."
For a moment or two after he had left the room Vallance looked at the closed door. Then he picked the envelope out of the grate, and studied the handwriting.
"Confound these women," he muttered, and consigned it to the flames. He liked to think himself a misogynist, and, incidentally, thoughts of drafts were worrying him.
Up in his own room Vane was poking the fire. His face was stern, and with care and deliberation he pulled up the arm chair to the blaze. Then he took the letter out of this pocket, and proceeded to read it through once again.
MELTON HOUSE, OFFHAM, NEAR LEWES.
MY DEAR,—It's just on midnight, but I feel in the mood for doing what I've been shirking for so long. Don't you know the feeling one gets sometimes when one has put off a thing again and again, and then there suddenly comes an awful spasm and one fairly spreads oneself? . . . Like putting one's bills away for months on end, and then one day becoming insane and paying the whole lot. I've been putting this off, Derek, for what I'm going to write will hurt you . . . almost as much as it hurts me. I'm not going to put in any of the usual cant about not thinking too hardly of me; I don't think somehow we are that sort. But I can't marry you. I meant to lead up to that gradually, but the pen sort of slipped—and, anyway you'd have known what was coming.
I can't marry you, old man—although I love you better than I ever thought I'd love anyone. You know the reasons why, so I won't labour them again. They may be right and they may be wrong; I don't know—I've given up trying to think. I suppose one's got to take this world as it is, and not as it might be if we had our own way. . . . And I can't buy my happiness with Blandford, Derek—I just can't.
I went down there the morning after Our Day—oh! my God! boy, how I loved that time—and I saw Father. He was just broken down with it all; he seemed an old, old man. And after luncheon in the study he told me all about it. I didn't try to follow all the facts and figures—what was the use? I just sat there looking out over Blandford—my home—and I realised that very soon it would be that no longer. I even saw the horrible man smoking his cigar with the band on it in Father's chair.
Derek, my dear—what could I do? I knew that I could save the situation if I wanted to; I knew that it was my happiness and yours, my dear, that would have to be sacrificed to do it. But when the old Dad put his arm round my waist and raised his face to mine—and his dear mouth was all working—I just couldn't bear it.