"I am not interested in your personal quarrels with Mr. Lyttleton," Sally told him frigidly. "Mine, if you please, I will settle for myself in my own way. When I desire your interference, I shall notify you. Till then--whatever the circumstances--I hope you will be good enough not to speak to me under any circumstances whatever."
With this she had left him dashed and staring.
Now, in retrospection, she was alternately sorry that she had said as much and that she had not said more. He had deserved either the cut direct and absolute, or he had deserved a thoroughgoing, whole-hearted exposition of his own despicable perfidy.
She could never forgive him--and, what was worse, she could never forgive herself for the smart of her wounded pride, when she recalled that shameful scene in the garden. She could not forgive herself for caring one way or the other. She could not forgive herself for admitting that she cared.
It was just this which rendered her position in Gosnold House positively untenable, however firmly it might seem to have been re-established by the events of the last half-hour.
It was just this which kept the girl from her pillow, buoyed by a feverish excitement.
She could never stay at Gosnold House and continue on terms of any sort with Trego and suffer the airs with which Mrs. Artemas would treat her vanquished rival in the man's affections, even though Sally had never been conscious of the rivalry nor in any way encouraged the putative prize.
It might seem ungrateful to Mrs. Gosnold; Sally couldn't help that, though she was sincerely sorry; the association simply must be discontinued.
And that, she declared in her solitude, was all there was about it. . . .
By the time she had succeeded in composing a note which seemed sufficiently grateful in tone to excuse the pitiful inadequacy of her excuse for absconding--that she was "out of her element" on the Island, an outsider, a Nobody, and didn't "belong" and never could--the chill light of early dawn had rendered the electrics garish.
She read the note over with hypercritical sensitiveness to its defects, but decided that it must do. Besides, she had used the last sheet of note-paper in the rack on her desk; more was not obtainable without a trip to the living-room. Then in desperation she appended, under the sign of the venerable P. S., a prayer that this might prove acceptable in lieu of more gracious leave-taking, addressed the envelope to Mrs. Gosnold, and left it sticking conspicuously in the frame of her dressing-mirror.
