"How Aunt Rosamond could----" thought the girl, "when she had been loved by such a man, ever, ever have looked at any one else? Fancy--the Runkle!" Ah, if Aspasia had been loved by English, how nobly she would have borne her widowhood! Her heart, of course, would have been absolutely, completely broken; she would have gone about in deep, deep widow's weeds. And strangers, looking after her, noticing the sweet pale face amid the crape, would ask who she was and would be told in whispers: the widow of the hero of the Baroghil expedition. "Ah, it would have been sweet to have been loved by you, Harry English!"
Her hands fell from the piano; her soul was away upon a dream as vague and innocent as it was absorbing. Too often did the Leschetizky method end in this manner. The while Rosamond, high in her attic, dreamed that she was a girl once more, and that she had just been told that Harry English loved her.
There was sunshine enough without to have tempted the most obstinate recluse into the fields. But as little as she had heeded November rain did Rosamond now heed the brightness of this opening December. While the old attic room held her bodily presence, her soul was once again back in the past. The past ... where, after all, she had not lived, and which (strange poignant lesson of fate!) was now to become to her more living than the present.
Those letters, those early memorials, the very thought of which had once inspired dread, now drew her like a magnet. Scarcely could she give herself to the necessary facts of life, so impatiently did she long for those solitary hours in his room, with him!
Every trifling note of his was pored over, dreamt upon in its turn. She had it in her to have lingered days upon a single line. Yet there was the sweetness of a tender surprise in every fresh sheet she took into her hands. And now it was her first "love letter" that she held.
It had come to her in the morning after their meeting in the salt wind, amid the gorse; had been brought to her--in the ugly top bedroom--on a basket brimming over with flowers. She could see them again, breathe them again: hot-house roses, languid-white and heavy-headed yellow, a huge clump of heliotrope, lily of the valley bound by its pale green sheaths, sharp-scented, waxen ... then the narcissus, the jonquil, the darling commoner herd of spring things that had pushed their way in the open gardens! All this to Rosamond, starved of beauty, Rosamond who was wont to fill her vases with the budding boughs that the hedges give the gardenless! She had buried her face in the velvet coolness, drawn in the perfume as if she was drawing in the loveliness to her soul. Through the waste of those ten years she could again feel the touch of the petals on her cheek--she was back again, back again in her maidenhood and held her first love letter between her hands. Was it possible that the faded nondescript leaf that fell from between its pages had once been part of that exquisite basketful that could still bloom for her?