Whilst dressing she paused at her reflection in the glass, with a feminine catch at the heart. She looked pale, old, faded, she thought; faint lines were around the corners of her eyes; her features seemed pinched. She shivered slightly—hurried foolishly over her hair, so that she could be spared the sight of her face as soon as possible.
“After all,” she said to herself, bitterly, “what does it matter? When that letter has gone, who in the world will care whether you look old or young?”
Life seemed to end for her from the moment the letter would fall from her hands into the letter-box. She kept it by her all day, unable to cut herself adrift. The small extra effort required to address a fresh envelope just raised the task above her strength. Once during the day she flung herself on the bed in a fit of sobbing. She could not send it. It would spoil his trip. She would wait till he returned, till she had seen his eye light up once more as he looked at her, and heard, for one last time, the throb in his voice that she was never to hear again. Just one more hour of happiness. Then she would give him the letter, stay by him as he read it, as a penance for her present pusillanimity. Feeling miserably guilty, yet glad of the respite, she wrote him the second letter that he had received. The one that she was to have sent she carried about with her in her pocket, until the outside grew soiled and dogs-eared.
They were not happy days. But she moved about the pension outwardly calm and serene, to all appearances her own self. The feeling of self-reproach for her cowardice wore off. She resigned herself to her lot. One sight of his face—and then the end of all things. She knew, with the knowledge of herself given by years of solitude and self-repression, that she would not falter in her second resolution.
So centred, however, were her thoughts in the tragic side of her relations with Raine that she gave no heed to the possibility of gossip. None reached her ears. Her long sustained attitude of reserve, a superiority of personality, a certain dignity of manner and conduct, had won for her the respect, if not the love, of the pension. Even Frau Schultz, who hated her, found it impossible to utter the spiteful innuendo that trembled on her lips. But Mme. Popea, who was the chartered libertine of the pension, by reason of her good-nature and unblushing liberty of speech, summoned up courage one day to tread upon the ice.
“Mon Dieu,” she said, as if by way of invoking the deity's aid in her venture, “it is getting dull again. I long to see Mr. Chetwynd back.
“He makes himself missed,” replied Katherine calmly, continuing her sewing.
Mme. Popea had come into her room with the ostensible purpose of borrowing a stiletto. It was one of her ways to stock her work-basket with loans.
“If the dear professor grows worse, he will return soon, I suppose. They are like women to each other, those two—good ones, in the vie de famille of novels. I hear the professor is much worse to-day.”
“Who told you?”