There was a brooding silence in the room where she sat writing and thinking. Roddy, for once, tired out from the night before, slept under his mosquito-net, side by side with the little girls, and Christine, looking at his beautiful, classical face and sensitive mouth, wondered how she would ever be able to carry out her plan to leave the farm. Who would understand him as she did, and protect him? Even the father who loved him had not known of the secret, fantastic danger of the dam. And the woman who should have destroyed the fantasy had encouraged it! But God knew what was in the heart of that strange woman; Christine Chaine did not--nor wished to. All she wished was that she might never see her again. As for Saltire, her proud resolve was to blot him from her memory, to forget that he had ever occupied her heart for a moment. But--O God, how it hurt, that empty, desecrated heart! How it haunted her, the face she had thought so beautiful, with its air of strength and chivalry, that now she knew to be a mockery and a lie!
She sat in the shuttered gloom, with her hands pressed to her temples, and bitter tears that could no longer be held back sped down her cheeks. In all the dark hours since she had stolen back to the nursery, overwhelmed by the discovery of a hateful secret, she had not wept. Her spirit had lain like a stricken thing in the ashes of humiliation, and her heart had stayed crushed and dead. "Cold as a stone in a valley lone." Now it was wakened to pain once more by the scent of three yellow roses carefully placed by Roddy in a jug on the table. The scent of those flowers told her that she must go wounded all her life. She could "never again be friends with roses." He had even spoiled those for her. How dared he? Oh, how dared he come to her with gifts of flowers in his hands straight from a guilty intrigue with another man's wife?
The children stirred and began to chirrup drowsily, and she hastily collected herself, forcing back her tears and assuming the expressionless mask which life so often makes women wear. She was only just in time. A moment later, Isabel van Cannan came into the room with a packet of letters in her hands.
"Oh, Miss Chaine," she said, with her pretty, child-like air, "would it be too much to ask you to take down these letters to the store presently? The mail is to leave about four o'clock. I have to go out myself by and by, but the Saxbys' house is in the opposite direction, as you know, and I am really not able to knock about too much in this heat."