"To do what?" gasped Amy.
"Well!" exclaimed Mildred. "It didn't take long to put him in his place, I hope. What impudence!"
"He had an impudent look," said Amy.
"Some man who was staying at the hydro where you were?" inquired Aunt Harriet. "Fancy! That's the worst of those large places. But I shouldn't let it worry you, my dear. It isn't worth worrying about. Very likely he didn't mean any harm by it. He didn't understand, that's all—didn't know your heart was buried with him who's gone."
"Disgusting, I call it," said Mildred. "But Aunt's quite right—we needn't talk about it.... I thought this morning—I don't know if you noticed it—that the saxifrage on the grave had gone rather thin; there was a gap here and there. I think we'd better see the superintendent. It isn't what it ought to be, by any means."
She stood struggling to say the rest—she struggled with all the puny will that was within her. And so unfit was she to struggle, that on surrendering, her paramount emotion was relief. She said, "Yes, we'll see him about it, and have some more."
She had intended to write to Murray in time for the evening collection. But she could not write that she had kept her word, and she shrank from writing that she had paltered with it. She lay sleepless, crying with mortification. Once a desperate impulse to be done with her compliance then and there, pulled her up, and she thrust on her dressing-gown; but her mind quailed even as she reached the door, and she sank on to the edge of the bed, procrastinating—and then crept back between the sheets.
She could not write that she had kept her word on the next day either, nor during the two days that followed. The just thing to them both would have been to write him exactly what had happened, but as she was a woman, the thing natural to her when she was to blame was to behave worse still by not writing at all. A feeble attempt she made, but ... what was there to say, excepting that she had failed? In every moment she was conscious of his waiting; she realised the glances that he cast at that letter-rack over the console table, and saw his mouth tighten at every disappointment that it dealt. And she was fond of him. Yet it was beyond her to sustain the effort to confess herself demeaned.
He telegraphed: "Coming to you by the seven o'clock train to-morrow Friday morning."