She paltered with the situation to the extent of writing another letter embodying a part of Kellock’s. And then she copied this, and copied it again. She destroyed the debris, including Kellock’s original draft, and left one letter perfect in every way—an exceedingly outrageous production.
She sealed it up and next morning assured herself that, for all practical purposes, it was the letter Kellock had designed. From a decision to tell him that she had added a phrase or two, she doubted whether it was worth while. Finally she determined not to tell him that she had altered the letter.
“It’s no good making needless complications,” she thought.
She was very happy and excited. She lived in a dream for a week, and the reality of the things she had decided to do lay altogether outside her calculations and anticipations.
Probably her greatest joy at this juncture centred, not so much in the happiness she had planned for herself and Jordan, as the thought of what people would say at Dene about their flight. She felt that to be invisible among her acquaintances on the morning of her departure, would have been even a greater delight than the first day in London with her future husband.
Lydia Trivett always remembered the seventeenth day of March as the most remarkable anniversary in her career. For upon that day she experienced such a succession of extraordinary and unexpected shocks and strains, that, looking back afterwards, she marvelled how any human mind was strong enough to endure them and not break down under such massive and accumulated provocation.
Enough adventures overtook Lydia on the seventeenth of March to suffice a well balanced woman for ten years.
The day was Sunday and opened without incident; but hardly had Mrs. Trivett got her brother’s children off to church, when Tom Dolbear descended from his wife with the news that he was going for the doctor and calling for the nurse.
“To-day makes or mars me,” he said. “If ’tis another girl, Lydia, I don’t know how I’ll bear up against it.”
“Be hopeful,” she urged. “There’s a law called the law of averages, so Mr. Knox tells me, and according to that, a boy’s very nearly certain.”
“Tell the man he’s a fool then,” he answered as he laced up his boots. “Children can’t be regulated by law, though it’s just like the cussed conceit of lawyers to think they can. And God help us if they could ordain these things, for they’d drive tidy hard bargains I’ll warrant.”