Then she returned to her letter.
It was a lengthy epistle, this Epistle of Theophilus. Primarily it was a love-letter; but when you have never written a love-letter before and never intend to write another, a good deal of secondary matter is apt to creep in. This letter contained the whole of Philip's simple philosophy of life; his confession of faith; the thoughts that a deeply reserved and extremely sensitive man sets down just once, and for one eye only. He felt that Peggy was entitled to a full and complete inventory of his thoughts about her; so he set them all down, page by page, line by line; not knowing that a woman as often as not chooses a man as she chooses a house, not because of the stability of the foundations or the purity of the water-supply, but because a quaint, old-fashioned sundial in the garden has caught her fancy, or some oddly shaped room in an out-of-the-way turret strikes her as the one and only site for a little private and particular retreat of her own. But Peggy read on.
The letter covered wide ground. It went back to their first wonderful meeting, and recalled childish conversations which Peggy thought she had forgotten. It told of knightly dreams, and of the Lady whom the Knight was one day to meet and marry—not realising that he had met her already. After that came more recent history—the second meeting, and the rapturous convalescence at Tite Street. The black months that followed the tragedy on Chelsea Embankment were sketched very lightly. Finally came the story of the momentous voyage upon the Bosphorus, and the race home.
The letter closed with a passage which need not be set down here. This is in the main a frivolous narrative; and there are certain inner rooms in the human heart, from the threshold of which self-respecting frivolity draws back with decent reverence.
The clock struck two. Simultaneously the outer door of the flat opened with the rattle of a latchkey; and next moment Timothy burst into the room. Peggy was curled up in the big armchair before the fire, apparently half asleep.
"That you, Timmy?" she enquired.
"Yes—dearest!" replied Timothy.
Inflated with the enormous pride of possession, he leaned over the back of the chair and gazed fondly down upon his prospective bride.
"Don't bother me just now," said Peggy. "I'm rather sleepy."