"It is all over between us," sobbed the girl, and beyond that she could learn nothing. Having failed to receive information, she immediately began to impart some, and told what Mr. Pollin had heard from Major O'Grady. Molly, who lay on the bed, kept her face buried in the pillow, and showed no signs of hearing anything. At last her mother left her, after saying that she would send her dinner up to her. The bewildered woman had never felt quite so put about since the death of the lord bishop. Could it be, she wondered, that she had made a mistake in encouraging Harry Penthouse's work tearing down Molly's belief in Hemming? Even her dinner did not altogether reassure her troubled spirit.
Several days later Miss Travers wrote to Hemming. It contained only a line or two. It begged his forgiveness. It called him to return and let her show her love. She sent it to his old address in Dublin, and in the corner wrote "Please forward."
"SEVERAL DAYS LATER MISS TRAVERS WROTE TO HEMMING"
Now it happened that Private Malloy, who had once been Captain Hemming's orderly, was sent one day, by a sergeant, for the officers' mail. He thought himself a sly man, did Mr. Malloy, and when he found a letter addressed to his late beloved master, in a familiar handwriting, he decided that it was from "one of them dunnin' Jews," and carefully separated it from the pile. Later he burned it. "One good turn deserves another," said he, watching the thin paper flame and fade.
Penthouse returned to his regiment without calling again on Molly and Mrs. Travers. Somehow, after the beating he had received, he did not feel like showing his face anywhere in town. Day after day Molly waited for an answer to her letter. By this time she had heard, from Captain Anderson (who had acted nervously during his short call), of Hemming's intention of going immediately to Greece. So for two weeks she waited hopefully. Then the horrible fear that she had hurt him beyond pardoning, perhaps even disgusted him, grew upon her. But for more than a month every brisk footfall on the pavement and every ring at the door-bell set her heart burning and left it throbbing with pain.
When she drove with her mother she scanned the faces of the men in the street, and often and often she changed colour at sight of a thin, alert face or broad, gallant shoulders in the crowd.
Captain Anderson was at Aldershot when he received his friend's letter from Jamaica. He went up to town and called on Miss Travers, and, without so much as "by your leave," read her extracts from the letter. She listened quietly, with downcast eyes and white face. When he was through with it she looked at him kindly; but her eyes were dim.
"Why do you taunt me?" she asked. "Is it because you are his friend?" The smile that followed the question was not a happy one.