Half consciously again her hands went to her throat. She unclasped the
pearl necklace that Edmund had seen on Madame Danterre's withered neck
in the garden at Florence. She slipped off four large rings, and then
gathered up a few jewels that lay about. "One ought not to leave
valuables about," she thought, and she did not know that she added
"after a death."
If Miss Carew had been in the room she would probably not have
understood that anything special was going on. Molly moved quietly
about, collecting together on a little table by the cupboard, rings,
brooches, buckles, watches--anything of much value. She sought and found
the key of the little safe in the wardrobe and put away these objects
with the large jewel cases already inside it. She also put with them her
cheque book and her banker's book. A very small cheque book on a
different bank where the interest of the L2000 had not been drawn on for
six months, she put down on her writing table. Then she looked round the
room. Was there nothing there really her own, and that she cared to keep
either for its own sake or because it had belonged to someone she had
loved? An awful sense of loneliness swept over her as she looked round
and could think of nothing. Each beautiful thing on walls or tables that
she looked at seemed repulsive in its turn, for it had either belonged
to Madame Danterre or been bought with her money. There was not so much
as a letter which she cared ever to see again. She had burnt Edmund's
few notes when she first came to Westmoreland House.
She had once met a woman who had lost everything in a fire. "I have
everything new," she wailed, "nothing that I ever had before--not a
photograph, not a prayer-book, nor an old letter. I don't feel that I am
the same person." The words came back now. "Not the same person," and
suddenly a sense of relief began to dawn upon her.
"Alone to land upon that shore
With not one thing that we have known before."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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