CHAPTER XVI
AS she came, pensively, from her morning bath into the sunny front room Athalie noticed the corner of an envelope projecting from beneath her door.
For one heavenly moment the old delight surprised her at sight of Clive's handwriting,—for one moment only, before an overwhelming reaction scoured her heart of tenderness and joy; and the terrible resurgence of pain and grief wrung a low cry from her: "Why couldn't he let me alone!" And she crumpled the letter fiercely in her clenched hand.
Minute after minute she stood there, her white hand tightening as though to strangle the speech written there on those crushed sheets—perhaps to throttle and silence the faint, persistent cry of her own heart pleading a hearing for the man who had written to her at last.
And after a while her nerveless hand relaxed; she looked down at the crushed thing in her palm for a long time before she smoothed it out and finally opened it.
He wrote:
"It is too long a story to go into in detail. I couldn't, anyway. My mother had desired it for a long time. I have
nothing to say about it except this: I would not for all the world have had you receive the first information from the columns of a newspaper. Of that part of it I have a right to speak, because the announcement was made without my knowledge or consent. And I'll say more: it was made even before I myself was aware that an engagement existed.
"Don't mistake what I write you, Athalie. I am not trying to escape any responsibility excepting that of premature publicity. Whatever else has happened I am fully responsible for.