The evening post brought me a letter and a registered parcel. I turned them over and over, examining the unfamiliar handwriting, the bright red seals; but all in vain. In spite of my hard-won knotlore, I was still kneeling over the package and wrestling with string and wax, when Mrs Bowater, folding her letter away in its envelope, announced baldly: "She's not coming home, it seems, at all these holidays, having been invited by some school friend into the country—Merriden, or some such place. Not that you might expect Fanny to write plain, when she doesn't mean plain."
"Oh, Mrs Bowater! Not at all?"
Cold fogs of disappointment swept in, blotting out my fool's paradise. That inward light without which life is dark indeed died in eclipse. The one thought and desire which I now realized I had been feeding on from hour to hour, had been snatched away. To think that they had been nothing but waste. "Oh, Fanny," I whispered bitterly to myself, "oh, Fanny!" But the face I lifted to her mother showed only defiance.
"Well," I muttered, "who cares? Let's hope she will enjoy herself better than mooning about in this dingy old place."
Mrs Bowater merely continued to look quietly over the envelope at me.
"Oh, but you know, Mrs Bowater," I quaked miserably, "it's not dingy to me. Surely a promise is a promise, whoever you make it to!"
With that I stooped my face over the stuffy-smelling brown paper, and attacked the last knot with my teeth. With eyes still a little asquint with resentment I smoothed away the wrappings from the shape within. Then every thought evaporated in a sigh. For there, of a delicate veined fairness against the white paper, lay a minute copy in ivory of none but lovely Hypnos. Half-blindly I stared at it—lost in a serenity beyond all hope of my poor, foolish life—then lifted it with both hands away from my face: "A present—to me! Look!" I cried, "look!"
Mrs Bowater settled her face over the image as if it had been some tropical and noxious insect I was offering for her inspection. But I thrust it into her hand and opened my letter:—
"My Dear Young Lady,—I am no poet, and therefore cannot hope to share with you the music of 'the flaming drake,' but we did share my Hypnos. Only a replica, as I told you, but none the less one of the most beautiful things I possess. Will you, then, give me the pleasure of accepting the contents of the little package I am having posted with this—as a small token of the delight your enthusiasm gave Yours most sincerely,—
"Walter Pollacke.
"PS.—Lady Pollacke tells me that we may perhaps again look forward to your company to tea in a few days, please do not think, then, of acknowledging this little message by post."