“Dear Mr. Ripley After a sleepless night, my head is aching cruelly. That is why I was unable to receive you. But, since you had told me that you were coming, I feel that I must write this note to explain and to apologize. I should have sent you word not to come, except that until now I have been too ill to use my eyes. The only help for me when I have a headache like this, is solitary confinement in a darkened room. I have braved the gaslight for an instant, to write you this note, and already I am suffering the consequences. But I felt that I really owed you my excuses. You will accept them in a lenient spirit, will you not?
“Sincerely yours,
“Ruth Lehmyl.”
I think Arthur’s first sentiment on reading this communication, had been one of disappointment. It was just such an apology as she might have written to anybody else under similar circumstances. He had nerved himself, he thought, for the worst before breaking the seal—for a decree forbidding him future admittance to her presence, for an announcement of her betrothal to another man—for what not. But a quite colorless, polite, and amiable “I beg your pardon,” he had not contemplated. It produced the effect of a wet blanket. From the high and mighty heroic mood in which he had torn it open, to the unimpassioned sentences in which it was couched, was too rapid a transition, too abrupt a plunge from hot to cold, an anti-climax equally unexpected and depressing.
But after a second perusal—and a second perusal followed immediately upon the first—his pulse quickened. With a lover’s swift faculty for seizing hold of and interpreting trifles light as air, he discerned what he believed to be encouraging tokens. Under what obligation had Mrs. Lehmyl been to write to him so promptly? At the cost of severe pain, she had hastened to make her excuses for a thing that there was not really the least hurry about. If she were quite indifferent to him, would she not have deferred writing until her headache had passed off? To be sure, it was just such a note as she might have written to Brown, Jones, or Robinson; but would she have “braved the gaslight” and “suffered the consequences” for Brown, Jones, or Robinson? Obviously, she had felt a strong desire to set herself right with him; the recognition of which fact afforded Arthur no end of pleasure.
By the time he had committed Mrs. Lehmyl’s note to memory, he was in a fair way to recover his wonted buoyancy of spirits.
Of course he rang her door-bell in the afternoon.
“How is Mrs. Lehmyl to-day?” he inquired of the maid. “I hope her headache is better.”
“Oh, she’s all well again to-day—just the same as ever,” was the reply.
An idea occurred to him. He had intended merely to inform himself concerning her health, leave the bunch of flowers he held in his right hand, and go his way. But if she was up and about, why not ask to see her?