’I am anxious [she wrote] to hear that you are well.  It is more than half a year since your last letter, and of late I have been constantly expecting a few lines.  The spring has been a time of trouble with us.  A distant relative, an old and feeble lady who has passed her life in a little Dorsetshire village, came to see us in April, and in less than a fortnight she was seized with illness and died.  Then Fanny had an attack of bronchitis, from which even now she is not altogether recovered.  On her account we are all going to Royat, and I think we shall be away until the end of September.  Will you let me hear from you before I leave England, which will be in a week’s time?  Don’t refrain from writing because you think you have no news to send.  Anything that interests you is of interest to me.  If it is only to tell me what you have been reading, I shall be glad of a letter.’

It was still ‘Yours sincerely’; but Godwin felt that the letter meant more.  In re-reading it he was pleasantly thrilled with a stirring of the old emotions.  But his first impulse, to write an ardent reply, did not carry him away; he reflected and took counsel of the experience gained in his studious solitude.  It was evident that by keeping silence he had caused Sidwell to throw off something of her reserve.  The course dictated by prudence was to maintain an attitude of dignity, to hold himself in check.  In this way he would regain what he had so disastrously lost, Sidwell’s respect.  There was a distinct pleasure in this exercise of self-command; it was something new to him; it flattered his pride.  ’Let her learn that, after all, I am her superior.  Let her fear to lose me.  Then, if her love is still to be depended upon, she will before long find a way to our union.  It is in her power, if only she wills it.’

So he sat down and wrote a short letter which seemed to him a model of dignified expression.

CHAPTER IV

Sidwell took no one into her confidence.  The case was not one for counsel; whatever her future action, it must result from the maturing of self-knowledge, from the effect of circumstance upon her mind and heart.  For the present she could live in silence.

‘We hear,’ she wrote from London to Sylvia Moorhouse, ’that Mr. Peak has left Exeter, and that he is not likely to carry out his intention of being ordained.  You, I daresay, will feel no surprise.’  Nothing more than that; and Sylvia’s comments in reply were equally brief.

Martin Warricombe, after conversations with his wife and with Buckland, felt it impossible not to seek for an understanding of Sidwell’s share in the catastrophe.  He was gravely perturbed, feeling that with himself lay the chief responsibility for what had happened.  Buckland’s attitude was that of the man who can only keep repeating ‘I told you so’; Mrs. Warricombe could only lament and upbraid in the worse than profitless fashion natural to women of her stamp.  But in his daughter Martin had every kind of faith, and he longed to speak to her without reserve.  Two days after her return from Exeter, he took Sidwell apart, and, with a distressing sense of the delicacy of the situation, tried to persuade her to frank utterance.