LITMIR.BIZ

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of unhappy, unnatural married life she and Godfrey had led.

      But it is always a painful task—that of turning over long-dead embers.

      Sitting there in the boudoir, close to the glowing fire, and with a big old-fashioned despatch-box at her side, she glanced at the letters which her husband had written to her during their brief engagement, and then she tied them up again and inscribed them with names and dates. They might give Alice pleasure some day, the more so that there was singularly little else remaining to tell Godfrey's child what he had been like at his best. She, Laura, only knew—Alice, thank God, would never know, would never understand—what melancholy memories these rather formal, commonplace love-letters evoked in the woman who as a girl had been their recipient.

      The very few letters which her husband had written to her during their married life, when he happened to be in London or away on business, she had always destroyed as they came. They had been brief, business-life communications, generally concerning something he desired to be done on the estate, or giving her the instructions he wished to have telephoned to the Bank.

      After glancing absently through them, she burnt many letters which she now wondered why she had kept—letters for the most part from friends of her girlhood who had gradually drifted away from her, and the memory of whom was fraught with pain. She put aside the meagre packet of her brother's letters, and then, at last she gathered up in her hands the score or more large envelopes addressed in Oliver Tropenell's clear, small, masculine handwriting.

      Should she burn these too—or keep them?

      Slowly she took out of its envelope the first of Oliver's letters which she had kept—that in which he expressed his willingness to become her trustee. For the first time she forgot little Alice, forgot the day when her daughter would read all that she found here, in her mother's despatch-box, with the same eager interest and perchance the same moved pleasure, which she, Laura, had felt when reading the letters her own beloved mother had left behind her.

      Consideringly she glanced over the first real letter Oliver Tropenell had ever written to her. Vividly she remembered the whole circumstances surrounding the sending and receiving of that letter, for it had followed close on the scene which, try as she might, she could not, even now, forget. It was in this letter that she now held open in her hand, that Oliver had heaped coals of fire on her head, by his quiet, kindly acceptance of the trusteeship. There was unluckily one passage she felt Alice should never have a chance of reading—for it concerned Gillie. So, though she was sorry to destroy the letter, she felt that on the whole it would be better to burn it, here and now.

      Hesitatingly she held out the large sheet to the bright fire—and as she was in the act of doing so, quite suddenly there flashed between the lines of firm, black handwriting other lines—clear, brownish lines—of the same handwriting. What an extraordinary, amazing, incredible thing!

      Laura slipped down on to the hearthrug from the low arm-chair on which she had been sitting with her despatch-box beside her, and bent forward, full of tremulous excitement—her heart beating as it had never beat before.

      "The decks are cleared between us, Laura, for you know now that I love you. You said, 'Oh, but this is terrible!' Yes, Laura, love is terrible. It is not only cleansing, inspiring, and noble, it is terrible too. Why is it that you so misunderstand, misjudge, the one priceless gift, the only bit of Heaven, which God or Nature—I care not which—has given to man and woman?"

      She stopped reading for a moment, then forced herself to go on, and the next few lines of that strange, passionate secret letter, burnt themselves into her brain.

      She let the paper flutter down, and covered her face with her hands. Could she—should she believe what this man said?

      "What you, judging by your words to-day, take to be love is as little like that passion as a deep draught of pure cold water to a man dying of thirst is like the last glass of drugged beer imbibed by some poor sot already drunk."

      It was a horrible simile, and yet—yes, she felt that it was a true smile. For the first time Laura Pavely dimly apprehended the meaning of love in the same sense that Oliver Tropenell understood it.

      She took up the sheet of paper again, and with the tears falling down her cheeks, she read the postscript which was superposed, as it were, on to the first.

      "God bless you, my dear love, and grant you the peace which seems the only thing for which you crave."

      After giving a shamed, furtive look round the empty room, Laura Pavely pressed the letter to her lips, and then she threw it into the fire, and watched it vanish into brilliant flame, feeling as if a bit of her heart were being burnt with it.

      Slowly she got up and went to the door; opening it, she listened for a while.

      The whole household was asleep, but even so, she locked the door before coming back to her station by the fire.

      She put more coal on the now glowing embers, and then she took up another letter Oliver had written to her, a letter written from Paris just after he and her brother had left London together for that long holiday on the Continent. Outwardly it was a commonplace letter enough concerning a change in certain of her investments; but when she held it to the fire, between the black lines there again started into pulsing life another message, winged from his soul to hers....

      "Laura, I have sworn not to speak to you of love, and even in this letter which you will never see, I will not break my oath. But as I go in and out of the old Paris churches (where alone I find a certain measure of solace and peace), in the women whom I see there praying I often seem to discover something akin to your spiritual and physical perfection.

      "It is strange, considering the business on which I am engaged, that I should feel thus drawn to haunt these old, dim Paris churches, but there at least I can escape from Gillie, of Gillie who talks perpetually of Godfrey, your owner and your tyrant."

      And as she read these last words, there came a cold feeling over Laura's heart. She realised, for the first time, how Oliver had hated Godfrey.

      She read on:

      "Gillie does not understand the reverence in which I hold you. Sometimes when he speaks of you—of you and Godfrey—I feel as if some day I shall strike him on the mouth.

      "But he is your brother, Laura. According to the measure which is in the man he loves you, aye, and even reverences you too, in his fashion; but with this reverence is mingled a touch of pity, of contempt, that you should be what he calls 'good.'"

      Good? Laura looked up and stared into the now glowing fire. Good in a narrow, effortless sense she had always been, but to the man who was so little her owner, though so much at times her tyrant, she had been, almost from the very first, hard, and utterly lacking in sympathy.

      It was with relief that Laura burnt that letter.

      The notes Oliver Tropenell had written to her in London while he was conducting the investigation into Godfrey Pavely's disappearance, held, to her disappointment, no secret writing in between. But the letters she had received from him since her widowhood all had an invisible counterpart.

      The first was written on ship-board:

      "Laura, I am now free to speak to you of love. The world would say that I must wait in spirit as I have waited in body, but I know at what a cost has been bought the relief from the vow which I faithfully kept.

      "The past is dead, the future is my own. I look back, dear love, to the few moments we had by the great window in your drawing-room, when my mother was talking to Alice over by the fire. You were so gentle, so sweet, to me then. It was as if—God forgive me for my presumption—you were regretting my departure. Till that moment I had felt as if the man who had once called you wife stood between us, an angry, menacing shape. But he vanished then, in that house of which he had never been the real master. And since that day he has not haunted me as he haunted me during those long long days of waiting for the news I at once longed for and dreaded.

      "When I come back I shall not ask you to love me, I shall only humbly ask you to let me love you."

      Laura

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