“Yes, my lady.”
The man went out.
Lady Holme stood up to give him the note. She remained standing after he had gone. An extraordinary sensation of relief had come to her. Action had lessened her pain, had removed much of the pressure of emotion upon her heart. For a moment she felt almost happy.
She sat down again and took up a book. It was a book of poems written by a very young girl whom she knew. There was a great deal about sorrow in the poems, and sorrow was always alluded to as a person; now flitting through a forest in the autumn among the dying leaves, now bending over a bed, now walking by the sea at sunset watching departing ships, now standing near the altar at a wedding. The poems were not good. On the other hand, they were not very bad.
They had some grace, some delicacy here and there, now and then a touch of real, if by no means exquisite, sentiment. At this moment Lady Holme found them soothing. There was a certain music in them and very little reality. They seemed to represent life as a pensive phantasmagoria of bird songs, fading flowers, dying lights, soft winds and rains and sighing echoes.
She read on and on. Sometimes a hard thought intruded itself upon her mind—the thought of Leo Ulford with the latch-key of her husband’s house in his hand. That thought made the poems seem to her remarkably unlike life.
She looked at the clock. The footman had been away long enough to do his errand. Just as she was thinking this he came into the room.
“Well?” she said.
“I gave Mr. Ulford the note, my lady.”
“Then you can go to bed. Good-night. I’ll put out the lights here.”