Left alone, Mary Coombe drank her tea, which after all was not very cold. She was not really interested in the letter, now that she had got it. Had not a vagrant breeze tossed it, obtrusively, upon her lap, she would probably not have looked at it.
Listlessly she picked it up, opened it, glanced at the firm, clear writing....
A sharp, tingling shock ran through her. It was as if some one had knocked, loudly, at dead of night at a closed door! That writing--how absurdly fanciful she was getting!
"Dearest wife," she read, "at last I can call you 'wife' without fear"--the vagrant breeze, which had tossed the letter into her lap, tossed it off again. Her glance followed it, fascinated!
Of course she had dreamed the writing? She had been terribly troubled by dreams of late. But what had Amy said about finding the paper in her mother's trunk? The whole thing was a fantastic nightmare. She had but to lean forward, pick up the letter, read it properly and laugh at her foolishness.
But it was a long time before she found the strength to pick it up. When she did, she read it quietly to the end with its scrawled "H." Then she read it over again, word by word. Her expression was one of terror and amaze.
When she had finished she looked up, over the pleasant garden, with blank eyes. Her face was ashen.
"He came," she said aloud. "He came! But--_what did she tell him when he came_?"
The garden had no answer to the question. Somewhere could be heard a girl's laugh and the sharp bark of a protesting puppy. Mary Coombe drew her hand across her eyes as if to clear them of film and, trying to rise, slipped down beside the elm-tree seat, a soft blot of whiteness on the green.
They found her there when they had finished washing the puppy, but though she came quickly to herself under their eager ministrations, she would not tell them what had caused her sudden illness. To all their questionings she answered pettishly, "Nothing! Nothing but the heat."
When a man of thirty-five has at last shaken himself free from the burden of an unhappy love affair, he is not particularly disposed to welcome an emotional reawakening. He knows the pains and penalties too well; the fire of Spring, he has learned, can burn as well as brighten. Callandar thought that he had done with love, and a growing suspicion that love had not done with him brought little less than panic. Upon the occasion of Willits' second visit he had begun to realise his danger and the professor never guessed how nearly he had persuaded him to leave Coombe. Some deep instinct was urging flight, but the impulse had come just a little bit too late. He could not go, because he wanted so very much to stay.