Chapter IV

“Dearest,” she wrote me next day, “did you sleep last night? I did not sleep a wink. All night long I lay dazzled and overwhelmed by this wonderful thing that has come to us. And then this morning, when God’s great dawn slowly lifted over the westward hills, I got up, did my hair (oh my beautiful, beautiful hair, now all yours, my own Man, all yours), and sat down to write this, my first letter, to you. I am sitting at the little window of my room in the Lion Tower. The breath of the roses rises in the fresh morning air; and out beyond the park, where the deer are placidly grazing, the slanting sun glints exquisitely on spacious woodland and rolling down, mile after mile.... Far away, against the blue of the horizon, there is a little pointing church spire, and somehow it reminds me of you.... Oh, my lover, I am going to lay bare to you the inmost shrine of my heart. You must be patient with me, very patient; for do we not belong to each other? We must live openly we two, we who are the apostles of new freedoms, of new realizations, of a second birth for this dear foolish old world of ours.” Thus she wrote, and there was more, much more, too sacredly intimate to be set down here, but breathing in every line the essence of her adorable self....

V

And then it was that Mary Browne came into my life. I had known her years ago when I was at college; I had thought her a meek and rather dull little girl, as insignificant as the rest of her family. But now there was about her a certain quality of graciousness, very difficult to define, but very unescapable when it is present, that gave to her mouse-grey hair and rather weak blue eyes a beauty very rare and very subtle. She had spent, she told me, two years in the East End at some social work or other....