“Good-bye, dear child. I am glad you have not a long journey before you. Stretham will take good care of you. You quite understand that I can do nothing indirectly—it will only be when I see him himself that I can tell him how sorry you have been.”
“Sorry and ashamed, be sure to say ‘ashamed,’” said Lady Margaret: “yes, of course, it can only be if—if he gets better or you see him yourself.”
Two or three days later came a letter to Lady Margaret from Mrs Englewood, inclosing one which that lady had just received from Mrs Selby. Her brother, she allowed for the first time, was out of danger, but “terribly weak.” And at intervals during the next few weeks the girl heard news of Mr Norreys’ recovery. And “I wonder,” she began to say to herself, “I wonder if Gertrude has seen him, or will be seeing him soon.”
But this hope, if hope it should be called, was doomed to disappointment. Late in October came another letter from her friend.
“I am sorry,” wrote Mrs Englewood, “that I see no probability of my meeting Mr Norreys for a long time. He is going abroad. After all, your paths in life are not likely to cross each other again. Perhaps it is best to leave things.”
But the tears filled Maisie’s eyes as she read. “I should have liked him to know I had come to do him justice,” she thought.
She did not understand Mrs Englewood’s view of the matter.
“It would be cruel,” Gertrude had said to herself, “to tell him how she blames herself, and how my showing her Mrs Selby’s letter had cleared him. It would only bring it all up again when he has doubtless begun to forget it.”
Nevertheless, Despard did not leave England without knowing how completely Lady Margaret had retracted her cruel words, and how bitterly she regretted them.