"Of course I forgive you! As if there were anything to forgive! And Miss Davenant too. I hope she is better now. Will you ask her to accept my love and best wishes for the future? And of course I include you. We were good friends, weren't we? As I said we should be the first time we met. Only I said then that you would find me worth having as a friend, and I'm afraid I did everything I could to disprove it. You stood me awfully well. I think you knew most of the dark corners in my mean little soul—and if you did, perhaps you see that I didn't do much beyond showing my true nature.
"This isn't a pose—I'm really—well, I was going to say 'broken'—but I hope I'm a little more tolerant. You'd hardly recognise me if you saw me, there's little enough of the 'Queen Elizabeth' about me now. It's a horrid, flat world, and I wish I could find something in it to interest me. May I ask for just one good mark? You wrote to me when you left England, telling me to swallow my pride and go to see the Seraph. Well, it was a struggle, but I did go—as you know. When I got there, I seemed to find more than I could bear, and so of course everything went wrong. But I did try, and you will give me my one little good mark, won't you? I want it.
"Mother says I'm run down and in need of a change, so Phil's taking me over to the United States at the beginning of December. There's a sort of Parliamentary Polytechnic Tour to Panama, every one who can get away is going to see the Canal. I don't in the least want to go, but I suppose the States can hardly be duller than England, and as long as mother thinks I must have a change, change I must have. If it isn't Panama it will be somewhere worse.
"We shall spend Christmas in New York. Will you send me a letter of good wishes to the Fifth Avenue Hotel? And tell me where you are going to settle permanently and whether you will let me come and see you. If your wife will not mind, I should like to see you both again—well and happy, I hope. Somebody must be happy in this world, or it wouldn't go on. I don't want to lose you as a friend; I'm feeling lonely enough as it is.
"I am hardly likely to see the Seraph again, but if you meet him, I should like you to give him a message. Say it is from a woman who did him a great wrong: say she now knows the wrong she did him and has been punished for it. Tell him you know how much she hates ever apologising or admitting she was wrong, but that she wants him to know of her apology before she finally passes out of his memory. Will you tell him that? It won't do any good, but it will make me more comfortable in my mind."
At the bottom of the page six words had been scratched out. I did not mean to read them, but the obliteration was incomplete, and the firelight shining up through the paper enabled me to decipher: "Oh, my God, I am miserable." Then followed the signature: "Affectionately yours (may I sign myself 'affectionately'?) Sylvia."
After reading her letter I concentrated my thoughts on the question how to blot out time, annihilate space, bridge two continents, and bring two proud, sore, sensitive spirits into communion. My method of attaining concentration of mind is to think of something different and wait for inspiration to solve my original problem. Joyce may remember the day when I stumped into her room and talked at large of honeymoons and winter resorts. That was the time when my mind was concentrated on the problem of Sylvia and the Seraph. She will further recollect assenting to my suggestion of a villa at Taormina.
On leaving her room I strolled round to the bank to see if they had agents in Sicily or could give me any information on the subject of a suitable villa. They were kind but helpless, and eventually I thought it the safer course to write for rooms at an hotel and look for a villa at our leisure. Ambling out of the bank, I wandered in the direction of the telegraph office.
Inspiration came in the interval between wiring for rooms and engaging berths on the Wagon-Lits—I knew it would. As soon as our places were booked I walked back to the telegraph office and cabled to the Seraph at Yokohama. "Letter and enclosures received with thanks," I wired. "All nonsense about not meeting again. Will you lunch Christmas Day, one-thirty? Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York.—Toby."
Then I came back to the Villa Monreale.