She saw the colour rise in Eve’s face, and the light that kindled deep down in her eyes.
“Not cured yet!”
“Have I asked to be cured?”
Eve read Canterton’s letter at her desk at Miss Champion’s. It was a longish letter, and as she read it she seemed to hear him talking in the fir woods below Orchards Corner.
“Dear Eve,—I write to you as a man who has been humbled, and who has had to bear the bitterness of not being able to make amends.
“I came to see things with your eyes, quite suddenly, the very morning that you went away. I took Lynette with me to Orchards Corner, to show her as a symbol of my surrender. But you had gone.
“I was humbled. And the silence that shut me in humbled me still more.
“I did not try to discover things, though that might have been easy.
“As to your leaving Fernhill so suddenly, I managed to smother all comment upon that.
“You had been offered, unexpectedly, a very good post in London, and your mother’s death had made you feel restless at Orchards Corner. That was what I said.