"I am leaving at sunrise, and in three days I shall be upon the sea. You will receive a cable, and so will my mother. The thought of seeing you again—ah, Laura, you will never know what rapture, so intense as to be almost akin to pain, that thought gives me. Lately your letters have seemed a thought more intimate, more confiding—I dare not say less cold. But I have sworn to myself, and I shall keep my oath, to ask for nothing that cannot be freely given."
Two days later Laura received a wireless message saying that Oliver would be at Freshley the next day.
CHAPTER XXII
A YEAR ago, almost to a day, Mrs. Tropenell had been sitting where she was sitting now, awaiting Laura Pavely. Everything looked exactly as it had looked then in the pretty, low drawing-room of Freshley Manor. Nothing had been added to, nothing withdrawn from, the room. The same shaded reading-lamp stood on the little table close to her elbow; the very chrysanthemums might have been the same.
And yet with the woman sitting there everything was different! Of all the sensations—unease, anxiety, foreboding, jealousy—with which her heart had been filled this time last year, only one survived, and of that one she was secretly very much ashamed, for it was jealousy.
And now she was trying with all the force of her nature to banish the ugly thing from her heart.
What must be—must be! If Oliver's heart and soul, as well as the whole of his ardent, virile physical entity, desired Laura, then she, his mother, must help him, as much as lay within her power, to compass that desire.
Since Godfrey Pavely's death, it had been as if Mrs. Tropenell's life had slipped back two or three years. All these last few months she had written to Oliver long diary letters, and Oliver on his side had written to her vivid chronicles of his Mexican life. Perhaps she saw less, rather than more of Laura than she had done in the old days, for Laura, since her widowhood, had had more to do. She took her duties as the present owner of The Chase very seriously. Still, nothing was changed—while yet in a sense everything had been changed—by the strange, untoward death of Godfrey Pavely.
Oliver's letters were no longer what they had been, they were curiously different, and yet only she, his mother, perchance would have seen the difference, had one of his letters of two years ago and one of his letters of to-day been put side by side.