“Do you know, my dear dear, that I pray for you every night?--for your health, your happiness, and your success?
“Now you know a little more of me. Is there more to learn, I wonder? Not if I can make it clear.
“The candle is in a most melancholy condition: in the last stage of collapse. I have prodded it out from its socket with my knife and set it flabbily on a penny--so it must work to its very last drop of life. That will not be long delayed. I shall suddenly be plunged into darkness and must undress in the dark. I shall be smiling all the time I am undressing, my thoughts with you.
“At eleven--ten minutes' time--I am to be leaning from the window gazing at Orion as you too--so we agreed--will be gazing. Each will know the other has his thoughts, and we will say 'good-night.' How utterly foolish! How contemptibly absurd, common!--and how mystically delightful! You and I with Orion for the apex of eye's sight and our thoughts flying from heart to heart the base!
“Georgie mine, if we had never met could we have ever been so happy? Impossible! Impossible! Before I pray for you to-night, I thank God for you.
“I have kissed the corner where I shall just be able to squeeze in--good-night.”
Such was her letter-disloyal to women in its exposure of those truths of women's love which are theirs by the heritage of ages, by their daily training from childhood upward, and against which they should most desperately battle; simple in its ideas of religion; silly in its baby sentiment.
Friday was the night of the incident in the library between Bob Chater and Mary; Saturday the exchange of love in the Park between Mary and her George; Saturday evening the writing of Mary's letter; upon Monday George read it.
Now it was Monday morning, and precisely at ten o'clock three persons set out for the same seat in Regent's Park--the mind of each filled with one of the others, empty of all thought of the third.
Mary--accompanied by David and Angela--carried towards the seat the image of her George, but had no heed of Mr. Bob Chater's existence; she was the magnet that drew Bob, ignorant of George; George sped to his Mary and had no thought of Bob.
Our young men were handicapped in point of distance. Mary, with but a short half-mile to go, must easily be first to make the seat; Bob, coming to town from a week-end up the river, would occupy little short of an hour. George from Herons' Holt to that dear seat, allowed full seventy-five minutes.