‘DEAREST SARA,
‘How can I describe the feelings with which I have heard of the strange things that have happened to you–of your illness (thank God that you are now restored to us!)–and of your marriage to Rudolf Falkenberg? I knew he loved you. I flatter myself that I was the very first to discover how suitable and delightful such a marriage would be. I can only offer to both of you my most hearty, unmixed congratulations. Ja, ich gratulire vom ganzen Herzen, und mein Mann auch. I think, if ever there was a noble, generous, good fellow, it is the man you have married. I should say he was perfect if I were speaking to an ordinary person, but I know you agree with me that perfect people must be so very horrid, and it always sounds to me more of an insult than anything else to call a person perfect. But it is a perfect arrangement all the same. How seldom, dear Sara, do we find the ways of Providence exemplified thus clearly and simply–everything working together for good in so palpable a manner that he who runs may read.’ [The countess’s moral reflections had been wont, in former days, to excite Sara’s intense amusement. Even now, in the tumult of her feelings, she could not help smiling at this specimen of them.] ‘It does my heart good–it does indeed. I feel as happy as I did myself when I had just been married to Fritz. Write, or get your husband to write, as soon as possible, to tell me how soon you will come to see us, and what your movements are going to be. How I long to see you both!
‘Yours,
‘CARLA VON TROCKENAU.’
Sara drew a long breath as she finished reading this effusion, and the colour rushed over her cheeks and brow and throat. Now, for the first time, she began to realise what the step meant that she had taken.
In vain she tried to reassure herself by recalling Rudolf’s promise that she should not repent, and that he would never repent. She could not be calm; she could not view the matter indifferently. She could not rid herself of the idea that she had hurried and hastened to take an irrevocable step; that in her agony of outraged pride and love repulsed, she had promised, and in her after state of helpless weakness and weary indifference she had done that which might mar a good man’s life, and make her own even more miserable than she had expected it would be.
What was she to do? How to meet him? When he came she must brace herself to the task of coming to some explanation, and she shrank in anticipation from what must be so intensely painful an interview.
Thus meditating, her eye fell upon Avice’s letter. At first she could only look at it, she could not open it. With the sight of that familiar handwriting there came rushing over her mind a vivid recollection of all the past sweetness and bitterness connected with Avice and those belonging to her. There came the recollection of Jerome–a memory which had slumbered since her illness, and which she had never allowed to awaken. Now it sprang forth again, irresistible, strong, and overpowering. Again she felt his influence, recalled to mind the love she had borne him, the–what was this feeling she experienced even now? Surely she did not love him yet? ‘No!’ cried every voice within her. And yet, beyond them all, was a whisper, more potent than any of them, asking what it was that she felt, demanding to know the meaning of this eager longing, this Sehnsucht, this yearning.
‘I am sure I have done wrong. I have made a horrible mistake!’ she repeated to herself. ‘What am I to do? How shall I repair it?’
With an effort she opened Avice’s letter, and read it with a throbbing heart. The girl gave a full account of her arrival at home, and of all that had happened since. She implored Sara to remember that she had known nothing of all that was going on, and not to punish her for Jerome’s sin. She related how the marriage was over, how Jerome and Nita were away, and she was at the Abbey with Mr. Bolton and Miss Shuttleworth as her companions; how Mr. Bolton was going to live at Monk’s Gate, ‘when they came home,’ but that she, Avice, was to live at the Abbey with ‘them.’
With beating heart Sara read Avice’s description of Nita, and understood at once that it must have been Wellfield throughout, who had played a double game, and had deceived both the woman he loved, and the woman whom he had married.
This was no case of a vulgar heiress who was anxious to ally herself with a man of old name; it was the case of a very simple-hearted loving girl, who had lost her heart irrevocably, and who would evidently suffer as intensely in her way, if not so passionately, as Sara Ford herself had suffered, if ever she knew the truth.
Avice betrayed again and again her liking for her new surroundings–a liking which she uneasily felt that she could not gratify without some disloyalty to her friend. As for Jerome–such had been the revulsion of feeling caused by his conduct, that Avice could not write of him without a certain tinge of bitter sarcasm cropping up through her words; and more than once occurred a kind of apology for even mentioning his name in a letter to Sara.