"I have written all this about myself, but it's hardly of myself I have been thinking. Indeed, I've written without thought at all, as if my pen knew all that I must say. I've been waiting for that book of yours. Is it coming soon? It's nearly two years since you were here, but I can squeeze all those months up into my hand and throw them from me. Will you send me a letter? "Alexander." The day after he had posted this letter to Theresa, he heard from Edward Webb. "Something has happened which I can hardly believe," he wrote, "which I do not wish to believe. Theresa is to marry a Basil Morton, nephew of the Mr. Smith for whom she works. I know nothing against him, I believe she is happy, I hope she will be happy in the future. Perhaps a father always dreads marriage for his child, and yet I can conceive of circumstances in which I should not feel this heavy load, like death. I tell you what I would say to no one else, but I feel as if my affection for Theresa had made my very body sensitive to what may hurt her, and receptive of warnings. Yet she is a woman; she is twenty-five, and my feelings may be nothing but an old man's jealousy and anger at a turn of events I had not planned. Please understand--Mr. Morton is a man of breeding and education. His devotion to Theresa is evident. My objections are all of that strongest, inexplicable sort, and I feel that she has already gone from me for ever. Perhaps I have dwelt too persistently on the thought of her all these years, if one can think too much of what one loves; perhaps my perception of most things has become blunted by looking too keenly at the one thing. I do not know. It all seems very dark to me, and the burden of child-bearing is not all the mother's. I have borne Theresa for five-and-twenty years, and now she is snatched from me. Is this selfishness? I think I could have given her more willingly to another, but perhaps not, for I find my baseness is unfathomable." The darkness which had so seldom left him now thickened and settled on Alexander, but first there was a bright spurt of light, a scattering of sparks that were the red colour of rage, and like the imprecations of his mind made visible. CHAPTER XXIII Mrs. Morton sat by the drawing-room fire, listening for the sound of wheels. The wind was high and as it dashed among the trees it made a roaring as of many chariots. Three times already she had laid down her crotchet and picked it up again, and now, wrapping a little shawl about her shoulders, she went to the window and watched for a blot on the whiteness of the drive that followed the side of the lawn for a little way before it curved out of sight.