XXVI
Moira awoke late, long after Potter Osprey had departed for the city, where he was to meet Roget and return with him in the car sometime that night.
It was her last week in the cottage. A few days after the departure of Rob Blaydon for the west, Elsie Jennings had paid her a visit and talked. Miles Harlindew was living with a young woman in the Village. There was a rumour of their going to Europe together.... Moira suppressed a twinge at this, in which at first there was more of sardonic humour than of pain. The pain came sharply afterward, but it did not remain long this time, and it left her at last aloof. She no longer felt the vestige of an obstacle to following her own inclinations, and she also had no further defence against Osprey’s attentions.
The growth of understanding between them was almost wordless, monosyllabic. It made her intensely happy to discover in his eyes how much she was bringing to him. A long time would have to elapse before she could give a worthy response to that emotion, but she felt that it would come....
The troublesome details of her future were therefore on this morning a matter of no concern to her at all. What filled her with delight was the immediate present. Never had she seen such weather as that October day, or if she had, never before had she been alive to its innumerable aspects at once. After the dubiousness and suffering of the past few weeks she felt both older and younger, both cleansed by experience and ready for more to come. Her whole womanly being was gathering itself for something new, and she meant to grasp it to the full. The ship’s engines were throbbing in her blood and the open sea lay beyond, but her hand was firm on the wheel....
It was a day to idle, one of those days when the children were positively in the way and work impossible. It was a day of heady egoism, of reveling in her securely felt advantages, and a certain sense of having won the spurs of lawlessness. She would be restless until to-morrow when the men came. What fine friends they were!
It was eleven o’clock, and, following her usual custom, she walked down to the grey metal box in which both her own mail and that of the Osprey house was deposited. She half expected to hear from Rob Blaydon who had promised to write her from Thornhill.
She ran through the letters quickly. There were none for her, but she went back to look again at a large envelope addressed to Osprey. She supposed she had done this simply because it was larger than the others and extended out around them while she held them in her hand. But there had been another reason, as she discovered on second examination. The handwriting was familiar....
She realized in fact that she was looking at the handwriting of Mathilda Seymour. She could not have mistaken it, even with nothing else to guide her, but there was the postmark of her city. She turned the envelope over, only to find confirmation in the return address.
She caught herself almost in the gesture of tearing it open. Her first thought had been that it was her letter, no matter whom it was addressed to. But she stopped herself in time. She could not open Potter Osprey’s letter. She wondered that she could have had the impulse to do so. Yet, as if she feared the temptation would be too strong, she kept repeating to herself, “I must not open it, I must not open it....” The temptation passed and did not return, but her disturbance and her curiosity were more stubborn.