Comethup gladly seized the opportunity. “Wouldn’t it be better,” he said, as he was going out of the room, “if you went on with dinner? ’Linda will only feel a thousand times more nervous if she thinks you have been waiting; whereas, if I bring her in quite in an ordinary way—well, she won’t feel so embarrassed.”
“Oh, these lovers!” ejaculated Miss Carlaw. “Well, I suppose you’re right; so I’ll ask the captain to have dinner in at once. And you’re both young—just make her run for it.”
Comethup ran at top speed to the house, and went plunging through the garden and up the steps to the balcony. Scarcely waiting to knock, he flung open the long window and stepped into the room. Mrs. Dawson was there, not sewing quietly as usual, but pacing up and down the room. She stopped in her walk for a moment and faced him.
“’Linda!” he exclaimed. “Is she ready?”
“I have not seen her for some hours,” replied the woman.
“Not seen her? But I——”
She took a note from the table and held it out to him. “I found this here just now; it is addressed to you. I had been out, and came back and found it here.”
There seemed a dreadful silence about the house and in the room; the very noise of the ripping of the envelope seemed to hurt him. He pulled the letter out, and came forward to the light to read it. And this is what he read:
“My dear, dear Boy: If I had not been a coward, if I had been, in anything, worthy of all your tenderness, your goodness, and your love for me, I might have faced you, and told you what you will here find written, and trusted to your mercy. I think now that if you were here, and held my hands and looked into my eyes with those deep, honest eyes of yours, I could not do what I must do—I could not leave you. God knows what a long and bitter fight it has been; how I have told myself, again and again, that you were the best man on earth, and that nothing should change my love for you. Believe that I meant that always; believe that I have tried, with prayers and tears, to shut everything else out. When first I met you, after we had grown to be man and woman, I carried something in my heart of which I dared not speak—the love of another man. On the first night that I ran down to meet you in the garden I thought he had come back to me. Now he has come back indeed, and all my world is changed, and I can cheat myself and you no longer. He is poor, and friendless, and helpless, but he will one day be a great man; and I, though I am but a poor, timid girl, can help him a little to his greatness as no one else can possibly do. If I am a coward, in running away and fearing to face you, forgive that, as you have forgiven so much else. We go to London this afternoon; we shall be married to-morrow. Something is tugging hard at my heart while I write this; you have been always so good to me that I seem to see you reading it. Forgive me; if you can find it in your big heart to do that, you will not quite forget—
“Your friend,
“’Linda.”