Then her next thought was: "Grace wouldn't let me—"
The study, in fact, was more untidy than ever, the pictures were back in their places whence Maggie had once removed them.
Husband and wife looked at one another. If she felt: "I've not managed my duty," he felt perhaps: "What a child she is after all!" But between them there was the gulf of their past experience.
"I'm sorry to hear that," he said, yawning. "Is she an old lady?"
"No, she's not," said Maggie, breathing very quickly. "I love her very much. I've been thinking, Paul, I've not been good about my relations all this time. I ought to have seen them more. I must go up to London at once."
"If your aunt's bad and wants you, I suppose you must," he answered. He got up and came over to her. He kissed her suddenly.
"You'll be wanting some money," he said. "Don't be long away. I'll miss you."
She caught the 2.30 train. It seemed very strange to her to be sitting in it alone after the many months when she had been always either with Grace or Paul. An odd sense of adventure surrounded her, and she felt as though she were now at last approaching the climax to which the slow events of the last two years had been leading. When she had been a little girl one of the few interesting books in the house had been The Mysteries of Udulpho. She could see the romance now, with its four dumpy volumes, the F's so confusingly like S's, the faded print, and the yellowing page.
She could remember little enough of it, but there had been one scene near the beginning of the story when the heroine, Emily, looking for something in the dusk, had noticed some lines pencilled on the wainscot; these mysterious pencilled lines had been the beginning of all her troubles, and Maggie, as a small girl, had approached sometimes in the evening dusk the walls of her attic to see whether there too verses had been scribbled. Now, obscure in the corner of her carriage, she felt as though the telegram had been a pencilled message presaging some great event that would shortly change her life.
It was a dark and gloomy day, misty with a gale of wind that blew the smoke into curls and eddies against the sky. There seemed to be a roar about the vast London station that threatened her personally, but she beat down her fears, found a taxi, and gave the driver the well-remembered address.