ow how to begin this letter--perhaps you will find it almost as
difficult to receive...."

In the small hours he woke to one of his habitual revulsions. Was that,
he asked himself, the sort of letter a lover should write to the beloved
on her release, on the sudden long prayed-for opening of a way to her,
on the end of her shameful servitude and his humiliations? He began to
recall the cold and stilted sentences of that difficult composition. The
gentility of it! All his life he had been a prey to gentility, had cast
himself free from it, only to relapse again in such fashion as this.
Would he never be human and passionate and sincere? Of course he was
glad, and she ought to be glad, that Sir Isaac, their enemy and their
prison, was dead; it was for them to rejoice together. He turned out of
bed at last, when he could lie still under these self-accusations no
longer, and wrapped himself in his warm dressing-gown and began to
write. He wrote in pencil. His fountain-pen was as usual on his night
table, but pencil seemed the better medium, and he wrote a warm and
glowing love-letter that was brought to an end at last by an almost
passionate fit of sneezing. He could find no envelopes in his bedroom
Davenport, and so he left that honest scrawl under a paper-weight, and
went back to bed greatly comforted. He re-read it in the morning with
emotion, and some slight misgivings that grew after he had despatched
it. He went to lunch at his club contemplating a third letter that
should be sane and fine and sweet, and that should rectify the confusing
effect of those two previous efforts. He wrote this letter later in the
afternoon.

The days seemed very long before the answer to his first letter came to
him, and in that interval two more--aspects went to her. Her reply was
very brief, and written in the large, firm, still girlishly clear hand
that distinguished her.

"_I was so glad of your letter. My life is so strange here, a kind of
hushed life. The nights are extraordinarily beautiful, the moon very
large and the little leaves on the trees still and black. We are coming
back to England and the funeral will be from our Putney house._"

That was all, but it gave Mr. Brumley an impression of her that was
exceedingly vivid and close. He thought of her, shadowy and dusky in the
moonlight until his soul swam with love for her; he had to get up and
walk about; he whispered her name very softly to himself several times;
he groaned