“Perhaps we ought not to have done so. But, oh, my dear Ronald, I shall be so rejoiced to go back! It was very good of Miss Massarene to offer its release,” she added, “so rude as we have all of us been to her.”
“You cannot be rude any more,” said Hurstmanceaux. “You have sold your freedom of choice for a mess of pottage. You have accepted this lady’s favors. You must embrace her in return if she exacts it.”
“How irritable Ronald has grown,” thought Lady Roxhall. “He used to be so kind and sweet-tempered. I suppose it is his having to sell his pictures that sours him. I wonder why he did sell them?”
Hurstmanceaux, before he went on board to sleep that night, wrote a letter at the R. Y. S. Club, which it cost him a great effort to write.
“But it’s not fair for all the generosity to be on her side,” he thought. “We must look like a set of savages to her. We have not even the common decency to thank her.”
“Madam,—
“Circumstances, on which it is needless for me to dwell, make it impossible for me to have the honor of any intercourse with you in the future. But do not think that I am, for that reason, insensible to the nobility, generosity, and kindness which you have displayed in your dealings with more than one member of my family, and the forbearance you have shown to one wholly unworthy of it. For the silence you have kept in the past, and have offered to preserve in the future, I pray you to accept my sincere gratitude. I beg to remain, Madam,
“Your obedient servant,
“Hurstmanceaux.”
This letter brought tears to the eyes of the woman to whom it was addressed, although she was but very rarely moved to such emotion. “Why should we be strangers,” she thought, “because of the sins or the crimes of others?”
She drew the check which he had sent her on his bankers, but she gave, at the same time, a commission to a famous art agent in Paris to buy back the Dutch and Flemish pictures of the Faldon Collection from the dealers who had purchased them, and on no account to let her name appear in connection with the purchase.