She wrote the most exquisite and womanly letter to thank her
many friends for their kind congratulations--and lamented, now that the
truth being known would not matter, that John had had a slight relapse,
and was not quite so well.
But, of course, she was taking every care of him, and so he soon would
be his old exuberant self!
Thus the period of John Derringham's purgatory began.
CHAPTER XXV
Grieving is such a satisfactory and dramatic thing when you can fling
yourself down upon the ground and cry aloud and tear your hair. But if
some great blow must be borne without a sign, then indeed it wrings the
heart and saps the forces of life.
When Halcyone got to her room, the housemaids were there beginning to
make her bed--so it was no refuge for her--and she was obliged to go
down again. The big drawing-rooms would be untenanted at this moment, so
she turned the handle of the door and crept in there. The modern
brightly gilt Louis XVI furniture glared at her, but she sank into a big
chair thankful to find any support.
What was this which had fallen upon her?--The winter, indeed--or, more
than that, not only the winter but the end of life, like the flash of
lightning which had struck the tree in the park the night before that
day which was to have seen her wedding?
And as she sat there in dumb, silent, hideous agony which crushed for
the moment belief and hope, a canary from the aviary beyond set up a
trilling song.
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