“So I should think, and it will be worse. Don’t do it, Sylvia. You will regret it always.”
“No, I think you are mistaken. Let us talk of Launa.”
That night Paul wrote to her. He waited with impatience for her answer.
When it came, she said she was leaving for Canada and the letter was posted at Liverpool.
CHAPTER XXIII
Launa’s first feeling was relief, relief—so intense, so endless, that she felt buoyant, joyful, secure. But after some days she felt shame. What had Hugh Wainbridge thought of her? What could a man think of a woman whom he could propose to wrong so terribly? And what had Paul thought of her? Why did he not come?
Why should she think he cared still? She had no reason to think so. Doubt, misery, and loneliness, became torturing demons; in action she saw the only relief possible, and then she remembered Canada, “Solitude,” the woods, the shore. Paul despised her, she was sure; she would go away, go home.
The penetrating depressing autumn mist was slowly making its way over the land, it was almost rain, it was so thick, and far more wetting. The river was shrouded in a white ghostly mantle. She thought of the keen air at “Solitude,” of the clear sky, and of the shore with the far-away landscape, mysterious and, always to her, enticing. And then of the storms, howling, fierce, and powerful, like the terrible force and presence of an unseen mighty power, the devastating Great Spirit of the North who, for five months of the year, reigns supreme, who is real, tangible, brutal, unlike the horrible slowness of this climate.
“Solitude” was empty, Launa cabled to the gardener’s wife who inhabited a lodge, and who once had been housekeeper.