She picked it up, and applied herself for a while to its dazing infinitives. But teeth-brushing is a rhythmic process: her thoughts wandered again perforce. She had got to be first.... Miss Hartill would be so pleased.... It would be heavenly to please Miss Hartill again as she used to do.... Nothing had been the same since Cynthia came.... She flushed to the eyes at the recollection of her last unlucky visit----"You needn't come again unless you can be more amusing. You might at least be natural...." Yet Miss Hartill had been so kind at the last ... had waved to her from the train....
The postman's knock startled her, disturbed her meditations anew. Letters! Was it possible? Would Miss Hartill have remembered? Have sent her, perhaps, a postcard? Stranger things had been. She had for weeks envisaged the possibility. She finished her dressing and tore downstairs.
The maid was hovering over the breakfast-table.
"Are there any letters, Baxter? Are there any letters?" But she had already caught sight of a foreign postcard on her plate, a postcard with an unfamiliar stamp. She scurried round the table, her heart thumping.
But the big, adventurous handwriting was hatefully familiar. The postcard was from Miss Durand.
She waited a moment, her lips parted vacantly, as was her fashion when controlling emotion; waited till the maid had gone.
Then she crumpled and tore the thin cardboard in her hand and flung it at last on the floor, in a passion of disappointment.
"She might have written!" cried Louise. "Oh, she might have written! It wouldn't have hurt her--a postcard."
Presently a thought struck her. She groped under the table for the torn scraps of paper and spread them in her lap, piecing them eagerly, laboriously. Miss Hartill might have written on Miss Durand's postcard.
She had the oblong fitted together at last and read the scrawl with impatient eagerness. Miss Durand was just sending her a line to wish her all imaginable luck. She and Miss Hartill were having a glorious time. They were sitting at that moment where she had made a cross on the picture postcard. She wished Louise could be with them to see the wonderful view over the valley and with good wishes from them both, was her Alwynne Durand....