'Don't!' said Rose, almost fiercely, drawing herself away. 'You don't know. It is a fate. Why did we ever meet? You may read his letter; you must—you misjudge him—you always have. No, no'—and she nervously crushed the letter in her hand—'not yet. But you shall read it some time—you and Robert too. Married people always tell one another. It is due to him, perhaps due to me too,' and a hot flush transfigured her paleness for an instant. 'Oh, my head! Why does one's mind affect one's body like this? It shall not—it is humiliating! "Miss Leyburn has been jilted and cannot see visitors,"—that is the kind of thing. Catherine, when you have finished that document, will you kindly come and hear me practise my last Raff—I am going. Good-bye.'
She moved to the door, but Catherine had only just time to catch her, or she would have fallen over a chair from sudden giddiness.
'Miserable!' she said, dashing a tear from her eyes, 'I must go and lie down then in the proper missish fashion. Mind, on your peril, Catherine, not a word to any one but Robert. I shall tell Agnes. And Robert is not to speak to me! No, don't come—I will go alone.'
And warning her sister back, she groped her way upstairs. Inside her room, when she had locked the door, she stood a moment upright with the letter in her hand,—the blotted incoherent scrawl, where Langham had for once forgotten to be literary, where every pitiable half-finished sentence pleaded with her—even in the first smart of her wrong—for pardon, for compassion, as towards something maimed and paralysed from birth, unworthy even of her contempt. Then the tears began to rain over her cheeks.
'I was not good enough—I was not good enough—God would not let me!'
And she fell on her knees beside the bed, the little bit of paper crushed in her hands against her lips. Not good enough for what? To save?
How lightly she had dreamed of healing, redeeming, changing! And the task is refused her. It is not so much the cry of personal desire that shakes her as she kneels and weeps, nor is it mere wounded woman's pride. It is a strange stern sense of law. Had she been other than she is—more loving, less self-absorbed, loftier in motive—he could not have loved her so, have left her so. Deep undeveloped forces of character stir within her. She feels herself judged,—and with a righteous judgment—issuing inexorably from the facts of life and circumstance.
Meanwhile Catherine was shut up downstairs with Robert, who had come over early to see how the household fared.