She wrote on a card:
“For cooking Fairy Food in the Wilderness. Miss Eve sends ever so much love.”
Eve had kept back one Latimer sketch, a little “post card” picture of a stone Psyche standing in thought on the edge of a marble pool, with a mass of cypresses for a background, and a circle of white water lilies at her feet. She sent the picture to Canterton with a short letter, but she did not give him her address.
“I feel that I must send you Christmas wishes. This is a little fragment I had kept by me, and I should like you to have it. Plenty of hard work keeps me from emulating the pose of Psyche in the picture. I am spending Christmas alone, but I shall paint, and think of Lynette entertaining Father Christmas.
“My friend, Kate Duveen, has gone abroad for six months. I think when the spring comes I shall be driven to escape into the country as an artistic tramp.
“I have just built a studio. It measures fourteen feet by ten, and lives in a back garden. So one is not distracted by having beautiful things to look at.
“I send you all the wishes that I can wish.
“Eve.”
When she posted the letter and sent off Lynette’s parcel, she felt that they were passing across a vacant space into another world that never touched her own. It was like a dream behind her consciousness. She wondered, as she wandered away from the post office, whether she would ever see Fernhill again.
If the incident saddened her and accentuated her sense of loneliness, that letter of hers, and the picture of the Latimer Psyche, saddened Canterton still more poignantly. It was possible that he had secretly hoped that Eve would relent a little, and that she would suffer him to approach her again and let his honour spend itself in some comradely service. He did not want to open up old wounds, but he desired to know all that was happening to her, to feel that she was within sight, that he did not love a mere memory.