In January he wrote:
"I have been trying to remember your face, and I am ashamed to say I cannot do it well. I remember that you were fair, and that you looked at the clock, and that you were not afraid of me, which most people are a little, because of the hand. I remember there was someone sitting by the wall, a cousin I think, very upright, who looked at me the whole time as if I were a witness in a case and she was waiting for me to perjure myself. I remember her better than you, which is unjust; but I think I was so busy with being looked at by her that I forgot to look.
"It does not matter. I know you better now than I could have from a hundred quarters of an hour in Bruton Street. I know you stew pears that do not ripen, and read to the dying, and think the dead go over their lists. I know you are kinder than I am and braver than you think. If I passed you in the street I might not know you, and it would not matter; I should know you in the dark."
Thomasin did not read that letter to Dorothea at all. She said it was short, and mostly about the drains, and Dorothea, who was at the time deep in an argument with her father about whether to sell the Wakefield warehouse, said, "Then tell him we are well," and did not ask again.
That night Thomasin took the letter up to her room and sat on the edge of the bed with it in her lap for an hour, and then put it in the bottom drawer with the others, and did not answer it for three days. When she did, it was the shortest letter she had written him since June, and the most careful, and it said nothing at all about the dark. She thought that was the beginning of being good again.
It was not. It was only the beginning of being afraid.
VI.
The letter that ended it came in the second week of March, on a day of thaw, when the gutters of Laura Place were running like mill-races and every carriage that passed threw grey slush up against the area railings.
It was short, for him. It said that the banns would be read at Carrowby on the three Sundays after Easter. It said that the wedding was fixed, by Mr. Ackroyd's own wish, for the twentieth of May, in the church of St. Cuthbert below the house, where every Ancroft for two hundred years had been married and buried. It said that Mr. Ackroyd and Miss Ackroyd, and Miss Ackroyd's companion if she pleased, were expected at Carrowby by the twentieth of April, so that Miss Ackroyd might see the house before she was mistress of it, and say what she would have changed.
And at the end, after the signature—below the black backward scrawl, as if it had been added later—there were three lines more in the fine sloping hand:
"I find I am afraid of meeting you. Is that absurd? I am a plainer man than my letters. You will see that at once. I hope you will forgive it, and go on writing to me anyway, across the breakfast table if you must."
Thomasin read it on the stairs. Then she went down again to the hall, and stood in front of the long glass by the door, and looked at a woman of twenty-seven in a grey stuff gown with her hair scraped back, holding a letter, with her mouth set in a line; and she knew that it was over, and that she had always known it would be, and that she had told herself for nine months it would not be because nine months was all the life she had ever had.