The other was from Colin. She turned to the passage she wanted. It was on the last page.
“Dearest, I don’t want to suggest any unseemly haste. It is always for you to make the decision, and I shall understand and acquiesce in anything you wish. Only, sweetheart, I am a good many years older than you, and time has cheated so many lovers. Shall we let him cheat us of any more years? Oh! if you only knew how I long for the time when we shall always be together, when just a whispered ‘Claudia’ will bring you to my side! You are with me in thought every hour of the day, but I want your dear presence. Dearest of friends, best of chums, when will you let me make you my wife?”
The wind fluttered the pages of the letter, so that she could not read any more. The sun was warm on her bare hand. All the earth seemed to say “Don’t delay any longer, don’t let the gods think you are ungrateful. Are you afraid of happiness?”
She raised the letter passionately to her lips.
“My Colin! My man!”
Then hastily thrusting it into her pocket, she half-walked, half-ran down the hill to the village. Her cheeks, a little thin from her self-imposed task, were a bright pink with excitement, and her whole body was aglow and superbly alive with the exercise as she pushed open a small, clanging door at the foot of the hill. There were oddments of sweets, toys and newspapers in the window, and a small boy who had just purchased some sweets that looked exactly like bootlaces stared at her in dull surprise as she passed him with a radiant smile. She had not just spent a whole halfpenny in two separate farthings’-worth at the sweet-counter, so why should she look so happy?
At the end of the shop was a small post-office department. The atmosphere was stuffy, and reeked of sealing-wax and tobacco. But the telegram would go all the same.
The romance of all the ages, of all the world, was in that piece of formal, ruled paper. The room might have been perfumed with attar of roses, and the boy with the liquorice bootlaces might have been Cupid himself! The telegram was not going on the prosaic wires, but on the wings of Love!