Shelton smiled and took out the draft.
"This Indenture made the____day of 190_, between Richard Paramor Shelton---"He put it down and sank back in his chair, the chair in which the foreign vagrant had been wont to sit on mornings when he came to preach philosophy.
He did not stay there long, but in sheer unhappiness got up, and, taking his candle, roamed about the room, fingering things, and gazing in the mirror at his face, which seemed to him repulsive in its wretchedness. He went at last into the hall and opened the door, to go downstairs again into the street; but the sudden certainty that, in street or house, in town or country, he would have to take his trouble with him, made him shut it to. He felt in the letter-box, drew forth a letter, and with this he went back to the sitting-room.
It was from Antonia. And such was his excitement that he was forced to take three turns between the window and the wall before he could read; then, with a heart beating so that he could hardly hold the paper, he began:
I was wrong to ask you to go away. I see now that it was breaking my promise, and I did n't mean to do that. I don't know why things have come to be so different. You never think as I do about anything.
I had better tell you that that letter of Monsieur Ferrand's to mother was impudent. Of course you did n't know what was in it; but when Professor Brayne was asking you about him at breakfast, I felt that you believed that he was right and we were wrong, and I can't understand it. And then in the afternoon, when that woman hurt her horse, it was all as if you were on her side. How can you feel like that?