What if his heart were as empty towards her as hers towards him? What if he still wrote, still paid, only from a sense of duty, and because he had given his word?
One day it was borne in upon her to try in a letter to ascertain his real feeling; and she wrote to him, about six months before her final return to England, after this fashion:
"We write to one another, you and I, of what we do, but not of what we think. Yet, since we last met, we must have changed, both of us. At least, I have changed, and it seems foolish to believe that you alone, of all men, have stood still in a world full of movement, of interest, of men, and of women too.
"I wonder—I often wonder—and at last my curiosity is so great that I feel I must let it out—what you seriously think, now, of the little comedy of our betrothal in the garden that Sunday evening?
"I wonder if you have realized how rash we were to promise any lifelong bond—we who knew nothing of either life or bonds: we who knew nothing of each other, of our respective characters and tastes?
"It seems to me impossible that you should not have traveled as far since then, in mind, as you have done in body. And I want to tell you this. If you have come to the conclusion—as it is borne in upon me that you must have—that we were a couple of silly, unreflecting things; please be sure that I, too, am growing up, that I, too, shall soon be able to work for myself, and to repay your goodness to me financially, if not in other ways; and finally, that I, too, see how unreasonable it would be for one of us to hold the other to such a compact in the future."
After the dispatch of this letter, she had awaited a reply in some trepidation.
It did not arrive for some weeks, since Felix and Vronsky, out in Siberia, were much occupied with certain happenings hereafter to be recorded fully. When at last a letter was received, it was inconclusive. Felix wrote that he hoped, before the end of the year, to get leave to come and see her. Until then he thought it best not to discuss the nature of their feelings for each other. For himself, if he wrote of what he did, and not of what he thought, that, as she must know, was out of deference to her commands. What he desired was, as always, her happiness. Just now he was not in a position to write more definitely, but as soon as his plans cleared, she should hear from him again.
That letter had reached Rona towards the end of February. She had not heard since, and it was now July. A remittance had arrived, however, regularly each month as usual.
The ceasing of letters from David had not troubled her much. Its effect had been to relegate the whole affair more and more to the background of her young eager mind, full of plans for the future and not eager to busy itself with the past.