“Dear Mr. Colville—I don’t know what you will think of my writing to you, but perhaps you can’t think worse of me than you do already, and anything will be better than the misery that I am in. I have not been asleep all night. I hate myself for telling you, but I do want you to understand how I have felt. I would give worlds if I could take back the words that you say wounded you. I didn’t mean to wound you. Nobody is to blame for them but me; nobody ever breathed a word about you that was meant in unkindness.
“I am not ashamed of writing this, whatever you think, and I will sign my name in full.
Colville had commonly a good appetite for his breakfast, but now he let his coffee stand long untasted. There were several things about this note that touched him—the childlike simplicity and directness, the generous courage, even the imperfection and crudity of the literature. However he saw it afterward, he saw it then in its true intention. He respected that intention; through all the sophistications in which life had wrapped him, it awed him a little. He realised that if he had been younger he would have gone to Imogene herself with her letter. He felt for the moment a rush of the emotion which he would once not have stopped to examine, which he would not have been capable of examining. But now his duty was clear; he must go to Mrs. Bowen. In the noblest human purpose there is always some admixture, however slight, of less noble motive, and Colville was not without the willingness to see whatever embarrassment she might feel when he showed her the letter, and to invoke her finest tact to aid him in reassuring the child.
She was alone in her drawing-room, and she told him in response to his inquiry for their health that Imogene and Effie had gone out to drive. She looked so pretty in the quiet house dress in which she rose from the sofa and stood, letting him come the whole way to greet her, that he did not think of any other look in her, but afterward he remembered an evidence of inner tumult in her brightened eyes.
He said, smiling, “I’m so glad to see you alone,” and this brought still another look into her face, which also he afterward remembered. She did not reply, but made a sound in her throat like a bird when it stirs itself for flight or song. It was a strange, indefinite little note, in which Colville thought he detected trepidation at the time, and recalled for the sort of expectation suggested in it. She stood waiting for him to go on.
“I have come to get you to help me out of trouble.”
“Yes?” said Mrs. Bowen, with a vague smile. “I always supposed you would be able to help yourself out of trouble. Or perhaps wouldn’t mind it if you were in it.”
“Oh yes, I mind it very much,” returned Colville, refusing her banter, if it were banter. “Especially this sort of trouble, which involves someone else in the discomfort.” He went on abruptly: “I have been held up to a young lady as a person who was amusing himself with her, and I was so absurd as to be angry when she told me, and demanded the name of my friend, whoever it was. My behaviour seems to have given the young lady a bad night, and this morning she writes to tell me so, and to take all the blame on herself, and to assure me that no harm was meant me by anyone. Of course I don’t want her to be distressed about it. Perhaps you can guess who has been writing to me.”
Colville said all this looking down, in a fashion he had. When he looked up he saw a severity in Mrs. Bowen’s pretty face, such as he had not seen there before.
“I didn’t know she had been writing to you, but I know that you are talking of Imogene. She told me what she had said to you yesterday, and I blamed her for it, but I’m not sure that it wasn’t best.”
“Oh, indeed!” said Colville. “Perhaps you can tell me who put the idea into her head?”
“Yes; I did.”
A dead silence ensued, in which the fragments of the situation broken by these words revolved before Colville’s thought with kaleidoscopic variety, and he passed through all the phases of anger, resentment, wounded self-love, and accusing shame.
At last, “I suppose you had your reasons,” he said simply.
“I am in her mother’s place here,” she replied, tightening the grip of one little hand upon another, where she held them laid against the side of her waist.
“Yes, I know that,” said Colville; “but what reason had you to warn her against me as a person who was amusing himself with her? I don’t like the phrase; but she seems to have got it from you; I use it at third hand.”
“I don’t like the phrase either; I didn’t invent it.”
“You used it.”
“No; it wasn’t I who used it. I should have been glad to use another, if I could,” said Mrs. Bowen, with perfect steadiness.
“Then you mean to say that you believe I’ve been trifling with the feelings of this child?”
“I mean to say nothing. You are very much older; and she is a romantic girl, very extravagant. You have tried to make her like you.”
“I certainly have. I have tried to make Effie Bowen like me too.”
Mrs. Bowen passed this over in serenity that he felt was not far from contempt.
He gave a laugh that did not express enjoyment.
“You have no right to laugh!” she cried, losing herself a little, and so making her first gain upon him.
“It appears not. Perhaps you will tell
