“The queen wouldn’t be as welcome,” he said simply.
Helen expressed no surprise at the unseasonable return of Joan and Johnny from their trip. There was no accounting for Joan’s moods; the main and the great thing was, it was due to no quarrel between them.
Johnny stayed to lunch. After it, Joan left him with Helen and went to her own room. She wanted to be alone, she wanted to think things out, to decide how to act, if she were to act at all.
“He called me ungenerous—three times,” she said, “ungenerous and—and now I know that I am, I deserve it.” She felt as a child feels when it has done wrong and longs to beg for forgiveness. In spite of her pride, her coldness and her haughtiness, there was much of the child still in Joan Meredyth’s composition—of the child’s honesty and the child’s frankness and innocence and desire to avoid hurting others.
“It was cruel—it was cowardly. But why is he here? What right has he to come here when I—I told him—when he knows—that I, that Johnny and I—”
And now, with her mind wavering this way and that way, anxious to excuse herself and blame him one moment, condemning herself the next, Joan took pen and paper and wrote hurriedly.
“I am sorry for what I did. It was inexcusable, and it was ungenerous. I ask you to forgive me, it was so unexpected. Perhaps I have hurt myself by doing it more than I hurt you. If I did hurt you, I ask your forgiveness, and I ask you also, most earnestly, to go, to leave Starden.”
She would have written more, much more, words were tumbling over in her brain. She had so much more to say to him, and yet she said nothing. She signed her name and addressed the letter to Hugh Alston at Mrs. Bonner’s cottage. She took it out and gave it to a gardener’s boy.
“Take that letter and give it the gentleman it is addressed to, if he is there. If he is not there, bring it back to me.”
“Yes, miss.” The boy pocketed the letter and a shilling, and went whistling down the road.