It ran:
JIM, I am not coming back. Here in my little bungalow I have found myself and I mean to keep myself!
I feel very kindly. All the hurt is gone now or I would not write. I see your genius, I really do, and I also see that it would be impossible for me to help you. I tried and failed horribly. Had you married a woman, the waiting, thankful sort, the kind of woman who would always be there when you came back, always glad to have you making your brilliant way and basking in your light, all would have been well. But, Jim, I want something of my own out of life, and I wasn't getting it. I was starving. I feared I would starve here, but I haven't and—— Well, Jim, I don't know how divorces are managed when people are as respectable as we, but unless you want to leave things as they are, do try to help me out. After all, you must be just enough to admit that there is something to be said for me?
The last feeling of security died in Norval's heart as he read. He had been flung into space when his wife had first spoken. He was not angry now. He was not really grieving, but he felt as a man might who, in falling, had been clutching to what he thought was a sturdy sapling only to find it a reed.
He had been falling ever since Katherine had shown him the "Awakened Soul," but he had reached out on the descent for anything that might stop him, even the partial relinquishing of his ambition. And here he was with nothing! Falling, falling.
Then, as one notices some trivial thing when one is most tense and shocked, Norval thought of that little girl of Alice Lindsay's fiddling away in Canada!
"I'll get down to Chicoutimi and take to the river; Point of Pines is on the way and I can do this for old Andy. It's about the only thing for me to do anyway, just now."
There were forest fires all along the route and travel was retarded. When Point of Pines was seen in the distance, its location marked by a twinkling lantern swung from a pole on the dock, the captain of the River Queen was surly because one lone traveller was determined to be put ashore.
"Why not go on to Lentwell?" he argued; "we're late anyway. You could get a rig to bring you back to this God-forsaken hole to-morrow. It's only six miles from Lentwell."
But Norval insisted upon his rights.