"Leaves"; "was"—the dingy letters blurred my sight. Footsteps were approaching. I huddled back to my carpet stool on the chair. Mrs Petrie had come to clear away the breakfast things. Stonily I listened while she cheerfully informed me that the glass was still rising, that she didn't recollect such weather not for the month for ten years or more. "You must be what I've heard called an 'alcyon, miss." She nodded her congratulations at me, and squinnied at the untasted bacon.
"I am going for a breath of air, Mrs Petrie," came Mrs Bowater's voice through the crack of the door. "Will you kindly be ready for your walk, miss, in half an hour?"
Left once more to myself, I heard the "alarm" clock on the mantelpiece ticking as if every beat were being forced out of its works, and might be its last. An early fly or two—my strange, familiar friends—darted soundlessly beneath the ceiling. The sea was shimmering like an immense looking-glass. More pungent than I had ever remembered it, the refreshing smell of seaweed eddied in at the open window.
With dry mouth and a heart that jerked my body with its beatings, I unfolded Fanny's scrap of paper:—
"Wise M.,—I have thrown the stone. And now I am fey for my own poor head. Could you—and—will you absolutely secretly send me any money you can spare? £15 if possible. I'm in a hole—full fathom five—but mean to get out of it. I ask you, rather than mother, because I remember you said once you were putting money by out of that young lady's independence of yours. Notes would be best: if not, a Post Office Order to this address, somehow. I must trust to luck, and to your wonderful enterprise, if you would be truly a dear. It's only until my next salary. If you can't—or won't—help me, damnation is over my head: but I bequeathe you a kiss all honey and roses none the less, and am, pro tem., your desperate F.
"PS.—Be sure not to give M. this address: and in a week or two we shall all be laughing and weeping together over the Prodigal Daughter."
Fanny, then, had not heard our morning news. I read her scribble again and again for the least inkling of it, my thoughts in disorder. That sprawling cross on the newspaper; this gibbering and dancing as of a skeleton before my eyes; and "the stone," "the stone." What did it mean? The word echoed on in my head as if it had been shouted in a vault. I was deadly frightened and sick, stood up as if to escape, and found only my own distorted face in Mrs Petrie's flower-and-butterfly-painted chimney glass.
"You, you!" my eyes cried out on me. And a furious storm—remorse, grief, horror-broke within. I knew the whole awful truth. Like a Shade in the bright light, Mr Crimble stood there beyond the table, not looking at me, its face turned away. Unspeakable misery bowed my shoulders, chilled my skin.
"But you said 'ill,'" I whispered angrily up at last at Mrs Bowater's bonneted figure in the doorway. "I have looked where the cross is. He is dead!"
She closed the door with both hands and seated herself on a chair beside it.
"I've trapsed that Front, miss—striving to pick up the ends. It doesn't bear thinking of: that poor, misguided young man. It's hid away...."