Do not read my letter. I will call for it—unopened—in person.
Rosalind Marsh.
She tugged at the bell-rope. When Pauline appeared, she whispered: "Quickly, Pauline, for my sake—this telegram." And as Pauline ran with it, she sank into a chair, and sat there with closed eyelids and trembling lips, sorely stricken in her pride, yet even more sorely in her heart.
Now, if her letter had gone by the post by which she had sent it, Osborne would have read it two hours or more before the telegram arrived. But it had been kept back by Pauline: and, as it was, the letter only arrived five minutes before the telegram.
At that moment Osborne was upstairs in his house. The letter was handed to Hylda Prout in the library. She looked at it, and knew the writing, for she had found in Osborne's room at Tormouth a note of invitation to luncheon from Rosalind to Osborne, and did not scruple to steal it. A flood of jealousy now stabbed her heart and inflamed her eyes. It was then near five in the afternoon, and she had on a silver tripod a kettle simmering for tea, for she was a woman of fads, and held that the servants of the establishment brewed poison. She quickly steamed open the letter—which had been already steamed open by Pauline—and, every second expecting Osborne to enter, ran her eye through it. Then she pressed down the flap of the envelope anew.
Two minutes afterwards Rupert made his appearance, and she handed him the letter.
He started! He stared at it, his face at one instant pale, at the next crimson. And as he so stood, flurried, glad, agitated, there entered Jenkins with a telegram on a salver.
"What is it?" muttered Osborne with a gesture of irritation, for he was not quite master of himself in these days. Nevertheless, to get the telegram off his mind at once before rushing upstairs to read the letter in solitude, he snatched at it, tore it open, and ran his eye over it.
"Do not read my letter. I will call for it unopened...."
He let his two hands drop in a palsy of anger, the letter in one, the telegram in the other—bitter disappointment in his heart, a wild longing, a mad temptation....
He lifted the letter to allow his gaze to linger futilely upon it, like Tantalus.... In spite of his agitation he could not fail to see that the envelope was actually open, for, as a matter of fact, the gum had nearly all been steamed away....