lity that still kept anything of
its youthful freshness in his mind was the very strong objection indeed
he felt to handing her over to anybody else in the world. And in
addition he had just a touch of fatherly feeling that a younger man
would not have had, and it made him feel very anxious to prevent her
making a fool of herself by marrying a man out of spite. He felt that
since an obstinate lover is apt to be an exacting husband, in the end
the heavy predominance of Oliver might wring much sincerer tears from
her than she had ever shed for himself. But that generosity was but the
bright edge to a mainly possessive jealousy.

It was Mr. Britling who reopened the correspondence by writing a little
apology for the corner of the small snapdragon bed, and this evoked an
admirably touching reply. He replied quite naturally with assurances and
declarations. But before she got his second letter her mood had changed.
She decided that if he had really and truly been lovingly sorry, instead
of just writing a note to her he would have rushed over to her in a
wild, dramatic state of mind, and begged forgiveness on his knees. She
wrote therefore a second letter to this effect, crossing his second one,
and, her literary gift getting the better of her, she expanded her
thesis into a general denunciation of his habitual off-handedness with
her, to an abandonment of all hope of ever being happy with him, to a
decision to end the matter once for all, and after a decent interval of
dignified regrets to summon Oliver to the reward of his patience and
goodness. The European situation was now at a pitch to get upon Mr.
Britling's nerves, and he replied with a letter intended to be
conciliatory, but which degenerated into earnest reproaches for her
"unreasonableness." Meanwhile she had received his second and tenderly
eloquent letter; it moved her deeply, and having now cleared her mind of
much that had kept it simmering uncomfortably, she replied with a
sweetly loving epistle. From this point their correspondence had a kind
of double quality, being intermittently angry and loving; her third
letter was tender, and it was tenderly answered in his fourth; but in
the interim she had received his third and answered it with considerable
acerbity, to which his fifth was a retort, just missing her generous and
conclusive fifth. She replied to his fifth on a Saturday evening--it was
that eventful Saturday, Saturday the First of August, 1914--by a
te