“My dear Miss Elizabeth,
“It has long been my desire to tell you how deeply——”
No! He tore up that too, and flung it into the waste-paper basket. Then he began to wonder with a sort of smarting uneasiness what Dick Stamford would put in his letter.
It was all very foolish, of course—the whole plan from that beginning of it in the Stamfords’ billiard-room was ridiculous to the last degree—but so, looked at in one way, are the chasings of the first white butterflies above a violet bank, and they are no less a part of springtime.
Andy got up and walked about the room; then he sat down again and began afresh, desperately—
“My dear Girl,
“I don’t know what to call you in a letter, because you are everything to me, and I can’t tell whether I am anything to you. But—”
he paused, pen uplifted—that was surely a ring at the doorbell. As he waited, for he had been too much engrossed fully to take it in, another peal echoed through the sleeping house and made the matter certain.
Hastily flinging his papers into a drawer, he went to the door, wondering, with a sudden anxious tug at the heart as he ran along, who was ill among the Gaythorpe folk, or what baby might suddenly need christening? Brother Gulielmus felt like that when men came with horn lanterns to wake him at dead of night and pilot him to some deathbed where the Devil wanted a lot of fighting if the soul were to soar away from his clutches. The little old house was gone, but it stood on the same spot, and everything was shaping Andy into the same sort of man.
He clattered the chain down and flung open the door. A dim figure stood in the shadow of the porch without speaking. Andy peered forth, concerned for one of his flock.