The morning, like the night, was mild, but with the chilly undercurrent suggestive of sudden rain that divides April from May. The city, always early to awake in some quarter, now wore its widespread spring alertness, and the venders of plants in a cheerful burst of bloom added their cries to the street sounds.
Looking toward the square for a sign of color in the tree-tops, Poppea saw a jet of water rising from the fountain that filled the air with spray through which some birds were flitting. That the fountain was being set in order showed that the same spring impulse was moving the city wheels that sent all the little hillside springs rushing madly to swell the tide of Moosatuck. How she hungered and thirsted for a sight of it!
At half-past nine, precisely to the moment, the time that he had been directed, Winslow's valet came in, closed the windows, drew the curtains across the alcove, and after arranging the toilet articles in the ample bathroom, which was also used as a dressing-closet, went out until the bell should say that his master wished his breakfast. For accustomed to luxury as Winslow was in externals, his primitive tastes were direct and simple and he detested the fuss and servility of bodily service.
When in half an hour's time, clad in a comfortable bath-gown, he lounged into the library and rang for his coffee, picking up the letters that were neatly piled on the desk, so quickly does the mind of man travel to direct issues, that he was already considering the coming change of breakfasting in one of the smaller rooms below stairs, and picturing Poppea, gowned in some filmy draperies, flitting in like one of the streaks of morning sunshine. As he glanced carelessly at the writing upon the various envelopes that he might receive a clew as to which, if any, were worth the trouble of opening on this particular morning, Poppea's characters fixed his eye. It is true that he had previously received but two or three brief notes from her, acknowledging flowers or an invitation, but the writing, full of decision and so opposite from the girl's almost poetic appearance, was of the type that is called characteristic and became fixed in the memory.
So she was moved to write immediately upon getting home, was his first thought; but instead of hastily tearing the note open, he turned it slowly and reflectively in one hand as he poured himself a cup of coffee, then drank it deliberately, and seated himself, before releasing the letter with a careful stroke of the paper-knife.
He had vainly tried the whimsical experiment of judging of the contents by the sense of touch. Everything about his connection with Poppea had been unusual, hence its added piquancy. Why should he not expect that its completion should be on the same plane? He almost dreaded the finding of a gushing and honeyed first love-letter of the newly engaged girl in her early twenties.
He read the letter through, then rubbed his eyes, turned the paper to the light, and read anew. In it was expressed gratitude to him coupled with self-reproach for allowing a bitter hurt to be revenged even in thought by the idea of marriage. There was a request for forgiveness, not for the retracting of a promise so much as for the sense of injury that had made the promise possible, and then the final statement that she would never take another's name until she had one of her own to yield. Piteous as was her agony of mind expressed, not so much in the words used as in their haste and almost incoherence, Winslow felt forcibly that the nature that lay beneath had its depths and measures of pride that his world could not fathom, because it was based upon a frankness, a fundamental noblesse oblige, that could neither be denied or argued away. A princess Poppea was, though wandering from her kingdom.
One thing was evident through it all. She had been doubtless attracted to him in a way, but she did not love him; her suffering, therefore, was complicated, but not keenly direct, as more and more every moment he felt his disappointment to be. Also the wind was taken out of any fanciful balloon of his self-sacrifice, and it fell collapsed.