A bright room, luxuriously appointed; a great wide bed with
carved posts and embroidered canopy; between the curtained
windows, a tall oak press with grotesque heads carved thereon,
heads that leered and gaped and scowled at me. But the bed and
the room and the oak press were all familiar, and the grotesque
heads had leered and gaped and frowned at me before, and haunted
my boyish dreams many and many a night.
And now I lay between sleeping and waking, staring dreamily at
all these things, till roused by a voice near by, and starting
up, broad awake, beheld Sir Richard.
"Deuce take you, Peter!" he exclaimed; "I say--the devil fly away
with you, my boy!--curse me!--a nice pickle you've made of
yourself, with your infernal Revolutionary notions--your digging
and blacksmithing, your walking-tours--"
"Where is she, Sir Richard?" I broke in; "pray, where is she?"
"She?" he returned, scratching his chin with the corner of a
letter he held; "she?"
"She whom I saw last night--"
"You were asleep last night, and the night before."
"Asleep?--then how long have I been here?"
"Three days, Peter."
"And where is she--surely I have not dreamed it all--where is
Charmian?"
"She went away--this morning."
"Gone!--where to?"
"Gad, Peter!--how should I know?" But, seeing the distress in my
face, he smiled, and tendered me the letter. "She left this 'For
Peter, when he awoke'--and I've been waiting for Peter to wake
all the morning."
Hastily I broke the seal, and, unfolding the paper with tremulous
hands read: "DEAREST, NOBLEST, AND MOST DISBELIEVING OF PETERS,
--Oh, did you think you could hide your hateful suspicion from
me--from me who know you so well? I felt it in your kiss, in the
touch of your strong hand, I saw it in your eyes. Even when I
told you the truth, and begged you to believe me, even then, deep
down in your heart you thought it was my hand that had killed Sir
Maurice, and God only knows the despair that filled me as I
turned and left you.
"And so, Peter--perhaps to punish you a little, perhaps because I
cannot bear the noisy world just yet, perhaps because I fear you
a little--I have run away. But I remember also how, believing me
guilty, you loved me still, and gave yourself up, to shield me,
and, dying of hunger and fatigue--came to find me. And so,
Peter, I have not run so very far, nor hidden myself so very
close, and if you understand me as you should your search need
not be so very long. And dear, dear Peter, there is just one
other thing, which I hoped that you would guess, which any other
would have guessed, but which, being a philosopher, you never did
guess. Oh, Peter--I was once, very long ago it seems, Sophia
Charmian Sefton, but I am now, and always was, Your Humble
Person, "CHARMIAN."