I obtained your address from your husband and I am writing you to tell you that he is extremely ill. We have done our best for him and he has a nurse with him constantly but I feel that you should come to him if it is at all possible. I do not know what responsibilities of family may hold you but I think it my duty to inform you that your husband is very sick. He lectured here on the fourteenth and the next morning the proprietor of this hotel called me to attend him. I found him in the first stages of typhoid and had him removed to a hospital here which is comfortable and where we have given him every attention. At a time like this his family should be with him. I regret that I must be the agent of such distressing news.
Faithfully yours,
L. D. Merritt, M.D.”
She read it through twice carefully. The thing struck her as quite unreal, although she had speculated on the possibility of his illness.
Then her mind, working reasonably, went on. She thought of trains and money. She had fifty—no forty-nine dollars and seventy-five cents. It wasn’t enough, she knew.
She had the time tables which she had obtained the day before. She studied them, her body held tautly, her face calm, showing a control which had come unconsciously. She could leave at three fifteen that afternoon. She’d have to change trains at midnight. She’d get there at noon next day. There was money. She must have money. No one to get it from unless she wired her father—better not—Miss Duffield away—Mr. Flandon away—Cele had none. She thought even of Ted Smillie. Better not—she’d pawn something. That was what people did when they needed money.
Like most girls she had a small collection of semi-precious jewelry—nothing of great value. She opened the little mock-ivory box on her dressing table and considered the contents carefully. Then she closed it, put on her hat and stuck the box in her pocket.
Pawning was unlike any experience she had ever had and not as exciting as books had led her to believe. She felt no shame—only a vague hostility to the pawnbroker. She hated his having so obviously the best of the transaction. He was scornful in her array of articles to sell—the gold bracelet that had cost her father thirty-five dollars—the little one carat diamond ring that had been her mother’s—the opal ring—the seal ring—the little silver locket.
In the end he gave her thirty-three dollars, and with the money in her hands she immediately got his point of view. She had exchanged a lot of things which meant little to her for the boundless power of thirty-three dollars which added to forty-nine made eighty-two.
She bought a ticket to Fairmount, Montana. It cost her twenty-eight dollars and sixty-four cents. She put it in her purse and went home, a splendid sense of action stirring her.
It took her a very short time to pack her bag. There remained two hours before the train. She spent it sitting in her room and letting the knowledge of what she was doing penetrate her mind. It occurred to her that she should let some one know where she was going but in the face of Gregory’s illness it seemed even less possible to confide the news of her marriage. That was to have been a glorious revelation to a few people. She could not turn it into tragedy, so she decided to tell no one.