Please give my love to Father.
Your loving daughter,
Muriel.
P.S.—Can't you get Aunt Beatrice for the luncheon?
She simply could not help writing her letter. It was the nearest approach that she could make to asking for the advice that she so sorely needed. It brought her into touch with homely and familiar things before she plunged irrevocably into the deep waters of her own decision.
She had sat wrapped up in her thick grey cloth coat in the bare chilliness of her bedroom, reading and re-reading the neat, small handwriting that always looked as though it might be going to say something interesting and that never did. She felt about it as soldiers feel about letters written on the eve of an advance. From a strange place she stretched out her hands to grasp, perhaps for the last time, at the safety of the known world.
But she had not posted the letter. Re-read in the cold light of early morning criticism, she had decided that it promised more than her feeble courage might perform. A scrupulous mental honesty had made her recognize her weakness long ago. "I am going to speak to Mr. Todd," she wrote, but nobody should read the words till she had spoken.
All the same, the last letter from Mrs. Hammond, one of a resigned but plaintive series, had to be answered. That was just as well, for it set a limit at last to Muriel's procrastination. The postman came to Thraile at six o'clock, leaving the letters and taking away with him any written by the household. If Muriel could only end that awful interview before six, she still might post her letter to her mother.
On paper it had seemed so simple; but then on paper and to Mrs. Hammond it would have been impossible to do justice to the atmosphere of Thraile. Those were two terrible people, sitting in the small front parlour; the old lady mumbling and rustling from the arm-chair by the fire, whose bright unseeing eyes could yet see everything; the cripple lying stretched before the window, his fiery spirit slowly burning through his mutilated body, until it seemed that it must quite consume all that was mortal and regain the liberty it proudly craved.
It was all very well pretending that she did not mind. For nearly an hour that afternoon, Muriel had walked along the steep moor road with Connie, listening to the angry emphasis of her reiterated words. To comfort her, Muriel had said, "All right, I'll speak to him." She did not add that for nights now she had dreamed of the approaching interview, had seen herself standing in the bright stuffiness of that over-heated room, confronting the fierce relentlessness of those piercing eyes, feeling her own gentleness driven away in blind surrender out into the whirling darkness of the passage. And supposing that she made things worse? Supposing that he resented her interference? That he himself had been thinking of sending Ben to Fallowdale, but perversely changed his mind at Muriel's blundering suggestion?