I ought to have made affectionate allowance for his nervous miseries; I ought to have run after him, and begged his pardon. There must be something wrong, I am afraid, in girls loving anybody but their fathers. When Helena led the way out by another door, I ran after Philip; and I asked him to forgive me.
I don’t know what I said; it was all confusion. The fear of having forfeited his fondness must, I suppose, have shaken my mind. I remember entreating Helena to say a kind word for me. She was so clever, she had behaved so well, she had deserved that Philip should listen to her. “Oh,” I cried out to him desperately, “what must you think of me?”
“I will tell you what I think of you,” he said. “It is your father who is in fault, Eunice—not you. Nothing could have been in worse taste than his management of that trumpery affair in the schoolroom; it was a complete mistake from beginning to end. Make your mind easy; I don’t blame You.”
“Are you, really and truly, as fond of me as ever?”
“Yes, to be sure!”
Helena seemed to be hardly as much interested in this happy ending of my anxieties as I might have anticipated. She walked on by herself. Perhaps she was thinking of poor papa’s strange outbreak of excitement, and grieving over it.
We had only a little way to walk, before we passed the door of Philip’s hotel. He had not yet received the expected letter from his father—the cruel letter which might recall him to Ireland. It was then the hour of delivery by our second post; he went to look at the letter-rack in the hall. Helena saw that I was anxious. She was as kind again as ever; she consented to wait with me for Philip, at the door.
He came out to us with an open letter in his hand.
“From my father, at last,” he said—and gave me the letter to read. It only contained these few lines:
“Do not be alarmed, my dear boy, at the change for the worse in my handwriting. I am suffering for my devotion to the studious habits of a lifetime: my right hand is attacked by the malady called Writer’s Cramp. The doctor here can do nothing. He tells me of some foreign woman, mentioned in his newspaper, who cures nervous derangements of all kinds by hand-rubbing, and who is coming to London. When you next hear from me, I may be in London too.”—There the letter ended.