There was no telegram. She had to wait nearly twenty-four hours for the slow transit of the mails from the high latitude of Inverness. And when she read Angus Hamleigh's letter--those few placid words which so quietly left her free to take her own way--her heart sank with a dull despair that was infinitely worse than the keen agonies of the last few days. The finality of that brief letter--the willingness to surrender her--the cold indifference, as it seemed, to her future fate--was the hardest blow of all. Too surely it confirmed all those humiliating doubts which had tortured her since her discovery of that wretched past. He had never really cared for her. It was she who had forced him into an avowal of affection by her unconscious revelation of love--she who, unmaidenly in her ignorance of life and mankind, had been the wooer rather than the wooed.
"Thank God that my pride and my duty helped me to decide," she said to herself: "what should I have done if I had married him and found out afterwards how weak a hold I had upon his heart--if he had told me one day that he had married me out of pity."
Christabel told Mrs. Tregonell she had written to Mr. Hamleigh--she spoke of him only as Mr. Hamleigh now--and had received his reply, and that all was now over between them.
"I want you to return his presents for me, Auntie," she said. "They are too valuable to be sent to his chambers while he is away--the diamond necklace which he gave me on my birthday--just like that one I saw on the stage--I suppose he thinks all women have exactly the same ideas and fancies--the books too--I will put them all together for you to return."
"He has given you a small library," said Mrs. Tregonell. "I will take the things in the carriage, and see that they are properly delivered. Don't be afraid, darling. You shall have no trouble about them. My own dear girl--how brave and good you are--how wise too. Yes, Belle, I am convinced that you have chosen wisely," said the widow, with the glow of honest conviction, for the woof of self-interest is so cunningly interwoven with the warp of righteous feeling that very few of us can tell where the threads cross.
She drew her niece to her heart, and kissed her, and cried with her a little; and then said cheeringly, "And now tell me, darling, what you would like to do? We have ever so many engagements for this week and the next fortnight--but you know they have been made only for your sake, and if you don't care about them----"