"Yours ever (this is no figure of speech),
"Mark Gifford."
Blanche Farrow sighed and smiled, as she deliberately read the long letter through twice. Somehow it warmed her heart; and yet would she ever be able to give up the life which in many ways suited her so well? If she married Mark—dear, kind, generous-hearted Mark—various friendships which, even if they did not mean so much to her as they appeared to do, yet meant a good deal in her present lonely life, would certainly have to be given up. To take but one instance. It had almost been an instinct with her to keep Lionel Varick and Mark Gifford apart. In the old days she had been disagreeably aware of how absolutely Gifford had always disapproved of Varick, and of Varick's various ways of trying, often successfully, to raise the wind. Of course, everything was now different with regard to this particular friend. Varick had become—by what anyone not a hypocrite must admit had been a fortunate circumstance—a respectable member of society; but, even so, she knew, deep in her heart, that he and the man whose letter she held in her hand would never like one another.
And yet she was tired—so tired!--of the sort of life she led, year in and year out. Her nerves were no longer what they had once been. For instance, the strange series of happenings that had just taken place here, at Wyndfell Hall, had thoroughly upset her; and as for the horrible thing that had occurred yesterday, she hadn't been able to sleep all night for thinking of it. Nothing that had ever happened in her now long life had had quite the effect on Blanche Farrow that Bubbles' accident had had. She had realized, suddenly, how fond she was of the girl—how strong in all of us is the call of the blood! As she had stood watching Dr. Panton's untiring efforts to restore the circulation of the apparently drowned girl there had gone up from Blanche's heart a wild, instinctive prayer to the God in whom she did not believe, to spare the child.
Perhaps just because she had not broken down before, she felt the more now all that had happened in the way of the strange, the sinister, and the untoward during the last fortnight. And all at once, after reading yet again right through the quiet, measured letter of her old friend and constant lover, Blanche Farrow suddenly burst into a passion of tears.
And then it struck her as funny, as even absurd, that she should cry like this! She hadn't cried for years and years—in fact, she could hardly remember the day when she had last cried.
She jumped out of bed and put on her dressing-gown, for it was very cold, and then she went and gazed at her reflection in the one looking-glass in the room. It was a beautiful old Jacobean mirror fixed over the dressing-table.
Heavens! What a fright she looked! Do tears always have that disfiguring effect on a woman? This must be a lesson to her. She dabbed her eyes with a wet handkerchief, and then she went over to the writing-table and sat down.
For the first time in her life Blanche Farrow wrote Mark Gifford a really grateful, sincere letter. She said, truly, how touched she was by his long devotion and by all his goodness to her. She admitted, humbly, that she wished she were worthy of it all. But she finally added that she feared she could never find it in her heart and conscience to say that she would do what he wished. She had become too old, too set in her ways....
Yet it was with a heavy heart that she wrote her long letter in answer to his, and it took her a long time, for she often waited a few moments in between the sentences.