was
to have read when she had done what she set out to do, but which now she
kept clutched in her hand, or hidden under her pillow--_Maurice must not
see that letter!_ If he read it, now, while she was (she told herself)
still half sick from those drenched hours of the trolley ride and the
dark wanderings from Mrs. O'Brien's to Mrs. Newbolt's, the whole thing
would seem simply ridiculous. Some time, he must know that she loved him
enough to buy Jacky for him, by dying--or trying to die! She would tell
him, _some time_; because her purpose (even if it had failed) would
measure the heights and depths of her love as nothing else could; but he
must not know it now, because she hadn't carried it out. That first
night, when she had found herself safe and warm (oh, warm! She had
thought she never would be warm any more!)--when she had found herself
in Mrs. Newbolt's spare room in the four-poster with its chintz hangings
and its great soft pillows, she had been glad she had not carried it
out. Glad not to be dead. As she lay there, shivering slowly into
delicious comfort, and fending off Mrs. Newbolt's distracted questions,
she had had occasional moments of a sense of danger escaped; perhaps it
_would_ have been wrong to--to lie down there in the river? People call
it wicked Mrs. Newbolt, for a single suspicious instant ("She forgot it
right off," Eleanor said; "she just thought we'd quarreled!"); but Mrs.
Newbolt had said it was "wicked." "But I didn't do it!" Eleanor told
herself in a rush of gratitude. She hadn't been "wicked"! Instead, she
was in Mrs. Newbolt's spare room, looking dreamily at the old French
clock on the mantelpiece, whose tarnished gilt face glimmered between
two slender black-marble columns; sometimes she counted the tick-tock of
the slowly swinging pendulum; sometimes, toward dawn, she watched the
foggy yellow daylight peer between the red rep curtains; but counting,
and looking, and drowsing, she was glad to be alive. It was not until
the next afternoon that she began to be faintly mortified at being
alive. It was then that she had felt that she _must_ get that
letter--Maurice mustn't see it! Little by little, humiliation at her
failure to be heroic, grew acute. Maurice wouldn't know that she loved
him enough to give him Jacky; he would just know that she was silly. She
had got wet; and had a cold in her head. Snuffles--not Death. He
might--_laugh_!... It was then that she implored Mrs. Houghton to get
t