A letter was found for Daphne in the little box beside her bed.
It ran thus:
Daphne, Darling,—
"It was I who first taught you that we may follow our own lawless wills, and that marriage is something we may bend or break as we will. But, oh! it is not so. Marriage is mysterious and wonderful; it is the supreme test of men and women. If we wrong it, and despise it, we mutilate the divine in ourselves.
"Oh, Daphne! it is a small thing to say 'Forgive!' Yet it means the whole world.—
"And you can still say it to the living. It has been my anguish that I could only say it to the dead.... Daphne, good-bye! I have fought a long, long fight, but God is master—I bless—I adore——"
Daphne sat staring at the letter through a mist of unwilling tears. All its phrases, ideas, preconceptions, were unwelcome, unreal to her, though she knew they had been real to Madeleine.
Yet the compulsion of the dead was upon her, and of her scene with Boyson. What they asked of her—Madeleine and Alfred Boyson—was of course out of the question; the mere thought of that humiliating word "forgiveness" sent a tingle of passion through her. But was there no third course?—something which might prove to all the world how full of resource and generosity a woman may be?
She pondered through some sleepless hours; and at last she saw her way plain.
Within a week she had left New York for Europe.