A telegram ten days old was not among the papers to be sorted, but Mrs. Romayne held one in her hand as she sat there at her writing-table. She had drawn it from the front of her dress and she read and re-read it, oblivious of the task she had set herself, with an intensity in her eyes which seemed as though it would wring a hidden meaning from the words. It was the telegram Julian had sent her ten days before. She folded it at last with a quick defiant gesture and drew towards her a packet of receipts.
She untied the string that fastened the papers, and out from among them there fell a folded letter, yellow with age, and crumpled. It had evidently worked its way into that packet by accident, as papers will when many are kept together, for it was obviously a letter and not a bill. Mrs. Romayne stretched out her hand mechanically and picked it up and opened it. Her eyes were met by the words, written in a childish, scrawling, much blotted handwriting: “My dear mamma.”
It was the letter which she had received from Julian twenty years ago at Nice.
In an instant, even as her eyes fell on those faded baby characters, so suddenly and so utterly that she never realised her loss, the self-control to which she had clung so fiercely melted away from Mrs. Romayne. Before the flash and quiver of recognition had subsided on her face she had seized the bell-rope and was ringing furiously for her maid. The woman, appearing breathless and alarmed a moment later, found her mistress searching feverishly for bonnet and cloak.
“I am going to London, Dawson. Order the carriage at once.”
The voice was harsh, rapid, and peremptory; but the bewildered woman hesitated.
“Now, ma’am?”
Mrs. Romayne turned on her with such a face as her maid had never seen before.
“At once, I said. At once!”
The last train was just steaming into the station when Mrs. Romayne’s carriage dashed up, the horse smoking and covered with foam.