A Double Marriage
have made over nearly all my fortune to you. See Greene & Hastings, and make what'arrangements you like. The house in town is yours, and the little place. I do not want you to grieve. On the contrary, I hope that now for the first time you will be happy. Your tears have almost broken my heart, principally, I believe, because I have not known the right way to wipe them away—to make you smile. Forgive me, dear, if you can, or if you cannot forgive, then forget me. Let it be as if it had never been. “CLIFFORD YELVERTON."
The man who had written the letter stood in the study at dawn, and looked around it for the last time. Then he laid the letter on the desk and went out into the hall, and put on his coat and hat. He unbarred the great hall door and lifted his eyes to the sky. There was a look of relief on his face—a look of exhilaration. So might a man step out of his prison and realise that Nature belonged to man, that his one inheritance was freedom, and that between him and creation a hidden secret rolled backwards and forwards, in a flux and reflux of silent understanding. The sky—he was unconscious of the underlying perception that not enough of it was visible to please him, that instinctively he panted for broader spaces, for expanses of wide waters, and great spans of heaven, for hilltops and deep ravines, and the great superfluity of distances.
