"It's worth thousands," said Ted. "Thousands. These bigwigs are queer customers. What an awful fool he is to part with it just out of sentiment. But of course I shall never sell it. It shall be an heirloom. I've told him so," and Ted thrust the letter into his pocket and hurried away.
Our rooms were airless, and Essie allowed me to establish her in a wicker armchair under a chestnut tree in the old-fashioned inn garden still brave with Michaelmas daisies and purple asters. The gleaming autumn morning had a touch of frost in it. I wrapped her fur motor cloak round her, and put her little hat on her head. She remained passive in my hands in a kind of stupor. Perhaps that might be the effect of the sedative I told myself. But I knew it was not so.
Essie was drinking her cup of anguish to the dregs. She did not rebel against it. She accepted her fate with dumb docility. She was not bearing it. She was not capable of an effort of any kind. She underwent it in silence.
I told her to try to sleep again, and she smiled wanly at me and obediently closed her eyes. As I went into the house to snatch an hour's rest and pack I turned and looked back at her motionless figure sunk down in her chair, her little grey face, pinched and thin like a squirrel's against the garish hotel cushion, her nerveless hands lying half open, palm upwards on her knee.
A faint breeze stirred, and from the yellow tree a few large fronded leaves of amber and crimson eddied slowly down, and settled, one on her breast and the others in the grass at her feet. She saw them not. She heeded them not. She heeded nothing. Her two worlds had clashed together, and the impact had broken both. They lay in ruins round her.
And so I looked for the last time on Essie.
Reader, I thought I could write this story to the end, but the pen shakes in my hand. The horror of it rushes back upon me. Ted's surprise at hearing that the Duke had gone to Essie in the garden, and that he had persuaded her to drive with him to London. Then his growing anxiety and continually reiterated conviction that we should find her in London, his uncomprehending fury when we reached London and--she was not there. And then at last his tardy realisation and desolation.