The carefully prepared bedchamber was in great disorder. The bedclothes were pulled from the bed and lay in a heap near by; towels, the soiled linen that Larry had discarded for 73 the fresh, that had been placed in the bureau drawers, was rolled in a bundle and flung on the hearth.
This aspect of the room did not surprise Mary-Clare. Larry generally dropped what he was for the moment through with, but there was more here than heedless carelessness. Drawers were pulled out and empty. The closet was open and empty. There was a finality about the scene that could not be misunderstood. Larry was gone in a definite and sweeping manner.
Dazed and perplexed, Mary-Clare went to the closet and suddenly was made aware, by the sight of an empty box upon the floor, that in her preparation of the room she had left that box, containing the old letters of her doctor, on a shelf and that now they had been taken away!
What this loss signified could hardly be estimated at first. So long had those letters been guide-posts and reinforcements, so long had they comforted and soothed her like a touch or look of her old friend, that now she raised the empty box with a sharp sense of pain. So might she gaze at Noreen’s empty crib had the child been taken from her.
Then, intuitively, Mary-Clare tried to be just, she thought that Larry must have taken the letters because of old and now severed connections They were his letters, but–––
Here Mary-Clare, also because she was just, considered the other possible cause. Larry might use the letters against her in the days to come. Show them to others to prove her falseness and ingratitude. This possibility, however, was only transitory. What she had done was inevitable, Mary-Clare knew that, and it seemed to her right––oh! so right. There was only one real fact to face. Larry was gone; the letters were gone.
Mary-Clare began to tremble. The cold room, all that had so deeply moved her was shaking her nerves. Then she thought that in his hurry Larry might have overturned the box––the letters might be on the shelf still. Quickly she went into the closet and felt carefully every corner. The letters were not there.
Then with white face and chattering teeth she turned and 74 faced Jan-an. The girl had come noiselessly to the house and found her way to the room where she had heard sounds––she had seen Larry fleeing on the lake road as she came over the fields from the Point.
“What’s up?” she asked in her dull, even tones, while in her vacant eyes the groping, tender look grew.
“Oh! Jan-an,” Mary-Clare was off her guard, “the letters; my dear old doctor’s letters––they are gone; gone.” Her feeling seemed out of all proportion to the loss.