Then she folded it carefully, deposited it in a box on
her table, which she locked. After a few minutes, however, she unlocked
the box again and transferred the letter to her pocket. The serenity
of her features did not relax again, although her previous pretty
prepossession of youthful spirit was still indicated in her movements.
Going into her bedroom, she reappeared in a few minutes with a light
cloak thrown over her shoulders and a white-trimmed broad-brimmed hat.
Then she rolled up the manuscript in a paper, and called her French
maid. As she stood there awaiting her with the roll in her hand, she
might have been some young girl on her way to her music lesson.
"If my brother returns before I do, tell him to wait."
"Madame is going"--
"Out," said Mrs. Ashwood blithely, and tripped downstairs.
She made her way directly to the shore where she remembered there was
a group of rocks affording a shelter from the northwest trade winds.
It was reached at low water by a narrow ridge of sand, and here she had
often basked in the sun with her book. It was here that she now unrolled
John Milton's manuscript and read.
It was the story she had told him, but interpreted by his poetry and
adorned by his fancy until the facts as she remembered them seemed to
be no longer hers, or indeed truths at all. She had always believed
her cousin's unhappy temperament to have been the result of a moral and
physical idiosyncrasy,--she found it here to be the effect of a lifelong
and hopeless passion for herself! The ingenious John Milton had given a
poet's precocity to the youth whom she had only known as a suspicious,
moody boy, had idealized him as a sensitive but songless Byron, had
given him the added infirmity of pulmonary weakness, and a handkerchief
that in moments of great excitement, after having been hurriedly pressed
to his pale lips, was withdrawn "with a crimson stain.
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