Great Possessions eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 387 pages of information about Great Possessions.

Great Possessions eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 387 pages of information about Great Possessions.
been living in for months.  For, looking back now, she could not feel sure that any of her views of Edmund’s feelings towards herself had been true.  It was a tearing at her heart’s most precious feelings to be forced to common sense, to see the past in the matter-of-fact way in which it might appear to other people.  And yet, Adela Delaport Green had expected him to propose even in the season, but then, what might not the Adela Delaport Greens of life suspect and expect without the slightest foundation?  Could Molly herself say firmly and without delusion that Edmund had treated her badly?  How she wished she could!  She would rather think that he had been charmed away by hostile influence, or even that he had deliberately played with her than feel it all to have been her own vain fancy!  It was agony to her to feel that she had without any excuse, set up an idol in her sacred places, and woven about him all the dreams and loves of her youth.  It must be remembered not only that it was the first time that Molly had loved in the ordinary sense of the word, but it was absolutely the first time that she had ever felt any deep affection for any human being whatever.  And now a great sense of abandonment was on her; the old feeling of isolation, of being cast out, that she had had all her life, was frightfully strong.  Edmund had left her; he had deceived her, played with her, she told herself, deluded her; and now her mother’s death brought home all the horror, the disgrace, which that mother’s life had been for Molly.  An outcast whom no one cared for, no one loved, no one wanted.  The new gentleness of the past weeks, the new softness, all the high and sacred thoughts that had seemed to have taken possession of her inner life, were gone at this moment.  Her feeling now was that, if she were made to suffer, she could at least make others suffer too.

She had thrown off her furs in walking up and down, and they had fallen on to the box which Dr. Larrone had brought.  Presently they slipped to the floor, and showed the small, black tin despatch box.

Molly broke the seal of the envelope, took out the key, and opened the box, half mechanically and half as seeking a distraction.

Inside she found two or three packets of old yellow letters, a few faded photographs, and a tiny gold watch and chain; and underneath these things a large registered envelope addressed to Madame Danterre.

Molly was not acutely excited about this box.  She knew that her mother’s will would be at the lawyer’s.  She had no anxiety on this point, but there is always a strange thrill in touching such things as the dead have kept secret.  Even if they have bid us do it, it seems too bold.

Molly shrank from what that box might contain, what history of the past it might have to tell, but she did not think it would touch her own life.  Therefore, thinking more of her own sorrow than anything else, Molly drew two papers out of the registered envelope, and then shrank back helplessly in her chair.  She had just seen that the larger of the two enclosures was a long letter beginning:  “Dearest Rose.”  She hesitated, but only for a moment, and then went on reading.

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Project Gutenberg
Great Possessions from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.