It was in the height of the season that Phemie found herself in Hastings once again, and the waves broke against the Parade, and the sea kept up its perpetual murmur, and the wind went sobbing away out upon the waters just as she could remember it doing in the days that were gone.
She did not come to Hastings as a visitor. She took no furnished apartments. She had to listen to no dissertations on the subject of plate, linen, and boot-cleaning. She was in Hastings for a purpose, not for any pleasure. She had come quickly, and she meant to return without delay; for which reasons she and Mr. Aggland took up their quarters at the hotel which stands at the east end of Robertson Terrace.
Seated by the window, straining her eyes out over the sea, Phemie went back over the years that had elapsed since she first beheld the Castle, the Parade, the East and West Cliffs.
She had come to Hastings to see an old friend who was mixed up with every sad memory of her life. Of all places Hastings was, perhaps, the one she would most have shrunk from revisiting; but necessity is a hard taskmaster, and necessity had brought Mrs. Stondon back to the sea, to the visitors, to the music, to the moonlight once again.
She wanted to see Miss Derno. On her arrival at Roundwood, immediately after her hurried departure from Marshlands, her first act was to inquire at what time the post went out; her next to write a letter.
Writing letters being an employment to which, at this present age of the world, men and women are much addicted, the fact of Phemie inditing an epistle before she rested or refreshed herself would scarcely be worth mentioning, had it not chanced that the missive in question was one over which she wept many tears and breathed many sighs.
It was a confession that she had been wrong, that she had been guilty of grievous injustice; it contained expressions of deep regret; it concluded with an earnest prayer for forgiveness.
In the main Phemie was of a just and a generous nature. She never spared herself, and she could not let the sun set, after her discovery of Basil’s marriage, till she acknowledged that Miss Derno’s suspicions of Georgina had been correct, that her own suspicions of Miss Derno had been wrong.
She had let Basil Stondon come between her and everything she most esteemed and valued; between herself and her husband; between herself and her family and her friends; between herself and purity; between herself and God.
And fully aware of all this, in her deep self-abasement, in the first agony of her mortified pride and vanity, with the first smart of the dreadful wound spurring her on, with the past spread open before her like a book, Phemie wrote such a letter to her old friend as caused Miss Derno, when at length it reached her, to mourn with an exceeding sorrow for the misery of the woman whom she had first met so young, so guileless, so shy and unsophisticated.