She stood there a long time staring down at a letter that, of its own power it seemed, stood out apart and separated from all the rest. She did not touch the letter. There was no power in her, nor no wish, to turn a page of it. It had no envelope. And it had, with insensate malice, spread out the whole of its front page to her eye.
It was a love letter, one link of a chain of established correspondence between a woman and Jimmie Wardwell.
After the first, heart-withering look at the page which gave her this complete, all-embracing intelligence, Augusta did not read. She stood staring dumbly, and then, still keeping her eyes helplessly on the page, she began to back, step by step, cowering away from it.
Creeping backward still, she came against the chair on which she had thrown her dress. Her hand went out mechanically and she grasped the dress, just where she had stuck the forgotten needle in it.
The pain of the piercing needle mercifully took her eyes away from that letter. She pulled the needle from where it had stuck in the palm of her hand, and mechanically brought the hurt up to her lips.
Then she looked at the dress. What was it doing there?
Oh yes! She remembered. She was going away. She had always known that she was going away. Now it was the time.
She took the dress and carried it over behind the little curtain of her hammock bed.
When she was ready to go, she sat down at the typewriter and wrote a line in the middle of a clean sheet of paper.
She was not herself, of course; and we do not know just what was passing in her mind. But she wrote: