Immediately returning to herself, she cried, ‘If I were in her place I know what I would like to do when I got the letter. I know who I would like to kill!’—this with a laugh as she went over and looked at herself in the mirror on the mantlepiece.
THIRD PART
JOHN SHERMAN REVISITS BALLAH
I
The others had gone, and Sherman was alone in the drawing-room by himself, looking through the window. Never had London seemed to him so like a reef whereon he was cast away. In the Square the bushes were covered with dust; some sparrows were ruffling their feathers on the side-walk; people passed, continually disturbing them. The sky was full of smoke. A terrible feeling of solitude in the midst of a multitude oppressed him. A portion of his life was ending. He thought that soon he would be no longer a young man, and now, at the period when the desire of novelty grows less, was coming the great change of his life. He felt he was of those whose granaries are in the past. And now this past would never renew itself. He was going out into the distance as though with strange sailors in a strange ship.
He longed to see again the town where he had spent his childhood: to see the narrow roads and mean little shops. And perhaps it would be easier to tell her who had been the friend of so many years of this engagement in his own person than by letter. He wondered why it was so hard to write so simple a thing.
It was his custom to act suddenly on his decisions. He had not made many in his life. The next day he announced at the office that he would be absent for three or four days. He told his mother he had business in the country.
His betrothed met him on the way to the terminus, as he was walking, bag in hand, and asked where he was going. ‘I am going on business to the country,’ he said, and blushed. He was creeping away like a thief.
II
He arrived in the town of Ballah by rail, for he had avoided the slow cattle-steamer and gone by Dublin.
It was the forenoon, and he made for the Imperial Hotel to wait till four in the evening, when he would find Mary Carton in the schoolhouse, for he had timed his journey so as to arrive on Thursday, the day of the children’s practice.