"I'll never forget how good you've been to me, Miss," she said, choking down a sob.
"Find Georgette," I said. "While she's clearing the table, bring down my writing-case. We'll do it under the trees."
Susan danced off with a skittishness that surprised me. When she came back, I asked her what she had decided to say.
"I was thinking, Miss," she said, "we might say how nice it would have been if he'd galloped over the Heath to the station. And don't you think, Miss, he would like to hear how we thought he was Mr. Lamb?"
"Never a word to him about Mr. Lamb as long as you live, Susan," I said peremptorily. "As for the Heath, it would have been very wrong of him. But how are you going to answer his postscript--this long bit at the end, all about your leaving me at once?"
"Leaving _you_, Miss?" asked Susan, mystified.
"Yes," I said, looking at her. "Don't you see? Lord Ruddington wants you to leave me at once."
Her face flushed with such genuine trouble that I forgave Susan everything, and took her back to my heart.
"Oh, no, Miss!" she cried. "I didn't understand he meant that. I wouldn't ever do that."
What Susan had taken the postscript to mean I have no notion. Nor do I know yet whether, in the near future, I shall be expected to give Susan and her spouse a suite of rooms at Traxelby, or whether she will offer me a housekeeper's place at the Towers. It is plain that she does not entertain the idea of our being parted.
"Lord Ruddington doesn't like to think that you are ... well, in any sense a servant. To put it plainly, he wants to find you money, so that you can begin to lead a lady's life at once. It does him credit. But, Susan, of course you can't take money from him. Have you saved anything?"
Susan says she has saved thirty pounds. And nothing could be sounder than the quickness and firmness with which she decided that cash transactions with Lord Ruddington just now are unthinkable. Nor can anything be more indisputable than her unweakened devotion to myself.
"You can go upstairs and practise handwriting," I told her. "Come down in about half an hour, and I shall have some sort of a letter ready."
But two half-hours passed in vain attempts to produce an epistle proper to Susan's temperament and intellect. I've realized this afternoon that I can never write a play. I tried hard to think and feel as Susan must think and feel; but I could only think and feel on my own account. At the end of an hour and a half, the best I had been able to achieve was this:--