Franklin on the handle and some sheets of note-paper with gilt edges.

Phyl noticed that the gilt was still bright.

She took out the paper knife and looked at it, and then held the blade to her lips to feel the smoothness of it, drawing it along so that her lips touched every part of the blade.

Then she put it back, and as she did so a little panel at the back of the desk fell forward disclosing 145 a cache containing a bundle of letters tied round with ribbon.

145

Phyl started as though a hand had been laid on her arm. The point of the paper knife must have touched the spring of the panel, but it seemed as though the desk had suddenly opened its hand, closed and clasping those letters for so many years. For a moment she hesitated to touch them. Then she thought of all the time they had lain there and a feeling that Juliet wouldn’t mind and that the old bureau had told its secret without being asked, overcame her scruples. She took the letters and sitting down again on the floor, untied the ribbon.

There were no envelopes. Each sheet of paper had been carefully folded and sealed with green wax, with the seal leaving the impression of the dove. There was no address, and they had evidently been tied together in chronological order. But the handwriting was the handwriting of Juliet Mascarene fully formed now.

The first of these things ran:

“It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t create old Mr. Gadney and send him to church to keep us talking in the street like that. I did not see you. You couldn’t have passed, and if you did you must have been invisible. I feel dreadfully wicked writing to you. Do you know this is a clandestine correspondence and must stop at once? You mustn’t ever write to me again, nor I mustn’t see you. Of course I can’t help seeing you in church and on the street—and I can’t help thinking about you. They’ll be making me try and stop breathing next. I don’t care a button 146 for the whole lot of them. It was all Aunt Susan’s doing, only for her my people would never have quarrelled with yours and I wouldn’t have been so miserable. I feel sometimes as if I could just take a boat and sail off to somewhere where I would never see any people again.

146

“It was clever of you to send your letter by P. This goes to you by the same hand.”

 Prev. P 85/185 next