CHAPTER XI.
IF WE ONLY KNOW! IF WE ONLY KNOW!
Eleanor's face is seared with weeping.
For the last three days Philip has hardly spoken to her.
She has stayed indoors and avoided Giddy, but now a message comes from the widow commenting on her non-appearance.
She pulls forward a sheet of paper, bites the end of her quill, and cries great drops of tears on the blotting-book. In a straggling hand she addresses an envelope to Mrs. Mounteagle, placing therein that unlucky letter from Madame Faustine.
In as few words as possible she relates the scene on paper to her friend.
"I am disheartened, dispirited, diseverythinged," she writes in conclusion. "As Dick in 'The Light that Failed' says; 'I am down and done for—broken—let me alone!'"
"Poor little wretch!" thinks Giddy, reading the sorrowful epistle. "I must tell Carol. He shall see this forlorn-looking scrawl." She sighs at the thought of some people's folly. "No sooner met, but they looked," she quotes to herself, apropos of Eleanor and Mr. Quinton. "No sooner looked, but they loved; no sooner loved, but they sighed. Ah! me, it's natural, very plain!"