She put the thought away lest it should lead
to others of which she would be ashamed, yet she felt a malicious
pleasure, lasting only for a second, at remembering that downstairs
sat Aunt Rose calmly full of affairs, Aunt Rose for whom the love of
Francis Sales had ceased too soon! And, suppressed but fermenting, was
the idea that in these late events, including the failure of her
escape, there was the kind hand of fate.
At that very moment Charles Batty chose to call.
'With a parcel, Miss Henrietta, and he would like to see you.'
'I can't see him,' Henrietta said. 'Tell him--tell him about Miss
Caroline.' She had already drifted away from Charles. He had been so
near last night, so almost dear in the troubled fog of her distress,
but this morning she had drifted and between them there was a shining
space of water sparkling hardly. But she spared him an instant of
gratitude and softness. His part in her life was like that, to a
sailor, of some lightship eagerly looked for in the darkness, of
strangely diminished consequence in the clear day, still there, safely
anchored, but with half its significance gone.
'I can't see him,' she repeated.
She wanted, suddenly, to see Aunt Rose. Voices no longer came from the
drawing-room. Mr. Batty, genuinely sad in the loss of an old friend,
had gone; the undertaker had tiptoed off to his gloomy lair, and
Henrietta went downstairs, but when she saw her aunt she dared not ask
her if she knew about Christabel Sales.
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