Page:The Breath of Scandal (1922).djvu/349

 to the next point of pause. Here we were now; here her life was, for the time standing still. You could not see the pendulum actually stand; yet you knew it must; it was obliged to be for some instant at rest. So now must come to the Hales a moment of rest.

Marjorie was in her own room, which was clean and fresh as always it had been kept for her. She had spoken to Sarah and Martin, both of whom knew about Billy; and Sarah had followed her to her room with offers to "help"; but Marjorie only thanked her and sent her away.

No change in Marjorie Hale's bright, pleasant room; nothing different; no surprise until, opening a drawer in her desk, she came upon a pile of unopened letters to her from her mother. Some one, her father probably, had arranged them in order by postmarks and one had arrived for each week her mother had been away. Marjorie noticed the postmarks: London, Winchester, Bath, and the other English towns and cities visited exactly on the schedule which her mother had made long before. Beyond doubt her mother had received, on schedule, the letters which Marjorie had written weekly in care of the Pall Mall office of the Guaranty Trust, which was always her mother's forwarding agent; and Marjorie was sure that, unless some extraordinary upset had occurred, there was nothing in all this pile of letters which would have required from her more concrete reply than she had made in her letters written without seeing these. She looked through them and found that her presumption had proved correct.

These were thoughtful, excellently expressed letters which her mother wrote, appreciative of the beauties, the serenities, the dignities of the sea, of the shore, of moor and downs, of Parliament buildings with the moon