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THE MAN ON THE OTHER SIDE
by
ADA BARNETT
[Illustration]
New York
Dodd, Mead and Company
1922
Copyright, 1922
by Dodd, Mead and Company. Inc.
Printed in U. S. A.
DEDICATED
TO HIM
“_Oh, I would siege the golden coasts
Of space, and climb high Heaven’s dome,
So I might see those million ghosts
Come home._”
_Stella Benson_
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
The Man on the Other Side
CHAPTER I
Ruth Courthope Seer stood on her own doorstep and was content. She
looked across the garden and the four-acre field with the white may
hedge boundary. It was all hers. Her eyes slowly followed the way of the
sun. Another field, lush and green, sloped to a stream, where, if the
agents had spoken truth, dwelt trout in dim pools beneath the willows.
Field and stream, they too were hers. Good fields they were, clover
thick, worthy fields for feed for those five Shorthorns, bought
yesterday at Uckfield market.
The love of the land, the joy of possession, the magic of the spring,
they swept through her being like great clean winds. She was over forty;
she had worked hard all her life. Fate had denied her almost
everything—father or mother, brother or sister, husband or children. She
had never had a home of her own. And now fate had given her enough money
to buy Thorpe Farm. The gift was immense, still almost unbelievable.
“You perfectly exquisite, delicious, duck of a place,” she said, and
kissed her hand to it.
The house stood high, and she could see on the one hand the dust-white
road winding for the whole mile to Mentmore station; on the other, green
fields and good brown earth, woodland, valley, and hill, stretching to
the wide spaces of the downs, beyond which lay the sea. In 1919, the
year of the Great Peace, spring had come late, but in added and
surpassing beauty. The great yearly miracle of creation was at its
height, and behold, it was very good.
In front of her sat Sarah and Selina. The day’s work was over. They had
watched seeds planted and seeds watered. They had assisted at the
staking of sweet-peas and the two-hourly feeding of small chicken. Now
they demanded, as their habit was, in short sharp barks of a distinctly
irritating nature, that they should be taken for a walk.
Sarah and Selina were the sole extravagance of Ruth’s forty years of
life. They had been unwanted in a hard world. Aberdeens were out of
fashion, and their sex, like Ruth’s own in the struggle for existence,
had been against them. So bare pennies which Ruth could ill afford had
gone to the keep of Sarah and Selina, and in return they loved her as
only a dog can love.
Sarah was a rather large lady, usually of admirable manners and
behaviour. Only once had she seriously fallen from grace, and, to Ruth’s
horror, had presented her with five black and white puppies of a
description unknown before in heaven or earth. Moreover, she was quite
absurdly pleased with herself, and Selina was, equally absurdly, quite
unbearably jealous.
Selina had never been a lady, either in manners or behaviour. She was
younger and smaller than Sarah, and of infinite wickedness both in
design and execution.
Ruth looked at them as they sat side by side before her.
“To the stile and back,” she said, “and you may have ten minutes’ hunt
in the wood.”
The pathway to the stile led through a field of buttercups, the stile
into the station road. That field puzzled Ruth. It was radiantly
beautiful, but it was bad farming. Also it was the only bit of bad
farming on the whole place. Every other inch of ground was utilized to
the best advantage, cultivated up to the hilt, well-fed, infinitely
cared for.
Ruth was not curious, and had asked no questions concerning the late
owner of Thorpe, nor was any one of this time left on the farm. The war
had swept them away. But after two months’ possession of the place, she
had begun to realize the extraordinary amount of love and care that had
been bestowed on it by some one. In a subtle way the late owner had
materialized for her. She had begun to wonder why he had done this or
that. Once or twice she had caught herself wishing she could ask his
advice over some possible improvement.
So she looked at the buttercups and wondered, and by the stile she
noticed a hole in the hedge on the left-hand side, and wondered again.
It was the only hole she had found in those well-kept hedges.
She sat on the stile and sniffed the spring scents luxuriously, while
Sarah and Selina had their hunt. The may, and the wild geranium, and the
clover. Heavens, how good it all was! The white road wandered down the
hill, but no one came. She had the whole beautiful world to herself. And
then a small streak came moving slowly along the centre of the road.
Presently it resolved itself into a dog. Tired, sore-footed, by the way
it ran, covered with dust, but running steadily. A dog with a purpose.
Sarah and Selina, scenting another of their kind, emerged hot foot and
giving tongue from the centre of the wood. The dog—Ruth could see now it
was a Gordon Setter in haste about his business—slipped through the hole
in the hedge, and went, trotting wearily but without pause, across the
buttercup field towards the house. To Ruth’s amazement, Sarah and Selina
made no attempt to follow. Instead they sat down side by side in front
of her and proceeded to explain.
Ruth looked at the hole, wondering. “He must have belonged here once, of
course,” she said, “I wonder how far he has come, the poor dear.” She
hurried up the slope, and reached the house in time to hear Miss McCox’s
piercing wail rend the air from the kitchen.
“And into every room has he been like greased lightning before I could
hinder, and covered with dust and dirt, and me that have enough to do to
keep things clean as it is, with those two dirty beasts that Mistress
Seer sets such store by. But it’s encouraging such things she is, caring
for the brutes that perish more than for Christian men and women with
mortal souls——”
Red of face, shrewish of tongue, but most excellent as a cook, Miss
McCox paused for breath.
“She do be wonderful set on animals,” said the slow Sussex voice of the
cowman. He settled his folded arms on the kitchen window-sill. A chat
about the new mistress of Thorpe never failed in interest. “But ’tis all
right so long as we understand one another.”
Ruth passed his broad back, politely blind to Miss McCox’s facial
efforts to inform him of her appearance in the background.
The dog was now coming up the garden path between apple-trees still
thickest with blossom. A drooping dejected dog, a dog sick at heart with
disappointment, a dog who could not understand. A dusty forlorn thing
wholly out of keeping with the jubilant spring world.
Ruth called to him, and he came, politely and patiently.
“Oh, my dear,” she said. “You have come to look for some one and he is
not here, and I cannot help you.”
She did what she could. Fetched some water, which he drank eagerly, and
food, which he would not look at. She bathed his sore feet and brushed
the dust from his silky black and tan coat, until he stood revealed as a
singularly beautiful dog. So beautiful that even Miss McCox expressed
unwilling admiration.
Sarah and Selina behaved with the utmost decorum. This was unusual when
a stranger entered their domain. Ruth wondered while she brushed. It
seemed they acknowledged some greater right. Perhaps he had belonged to
the man who had so loved and cared for Thorpe before she came. And he
had left all—and the dog.
Presently the dog lay down in a chosen place from which he could command
a view of both the front drive and the road from the station. He lay
with his nose between his paws and watched.
After supper Ruth Seer went and sat with him. The stars looked down with
clear bright eyes. The night wind brought the scent of a thousand
flowers. An immense peace and beauty filled the heavens. Yet, as she
sat, she fancied she heard again the low monotonous boom from the
Channel to which people had grown so accustomed through the long war
years. She knew it could not really be; it was just fancy. But suddenly
her eyes were full of tears. She had lost no one out there—she had no
one to lose. But she was an English woman. They were all her men. And
there were so many white roads, from as many stations.
The next morning the stranger dog had vanished, after, so Miss McCox
reported bitterly at 6 A. M., a night spent on the spare-room bed. It
was a perfect wonder of a morning. Even on that first morning when the
stars sang together it could not have been more wonderful, thought Ruth
Seer, looking, as she never tired of looking, at the farm that was hers.
The five Shorthorns chewed the cud in the four-acre field. The verdict
of Miss McCox, the cowman and the boy, upon them was favourable.
To-morrow morning Ruth would have her first lesson in milking. The
Berkshire sow, bought also at Uckfield market, had produced during the
night, somewhat unexpectedly, but very successfully, thirteen small
black pigs, shining like satin and wholly delectable.
The only blot on the perfection of the day was the behaviour of Selina.
At 11 A. M. she was detected by Miss McCox, in full pursuit of the last
hatched brood of chicken. Caught, or to be fair to Selina, cornered, by
the entire staff, at 11.30, she was well and handsomely whipped, and
crept, an apparently chastened dog, into the shelter of the house.
There, however, so soon as the clang of the big bell proclaimed the busy
dinner hour, she had proceeded to the room sacred to the slumbers of
Miss McCox and, undisturbed, had diligently made a hole in the pillow on
which Miss McCox’s head nightly reposed, extracting therefrom the
feathers of many chickens. These she spread lavishly, and without
favouritism, over the surface of the entire carpet, and, well content,
withdrew silently and discreetly from the precincts of Thorpe Farm.
At tea time she was still missing, and Sarah alone, stiff with conscious
rectitude, sat in front of Ruth and ate a double portion of cake and
bread-and-butter. Visions of rabbit holes, steel traps, of angry
gamekeepers with guns, had begun to form in Ruth’s mind. Her well-earned
appetite for tea vanished. Full forgiveness and an undeservedly warm
welcome awaited Selina whenever she might choose to put in an
appearance.
Even Miss McCox, when she cleared away the tea, withdrew the notice
given in the heat of discovery, and suggested that Selina might be
hunting along the stream. She had seen the strange dog down there no
longer than an hour ago.
It seemed to Ruth a hopeful suggestion. Also she loved to wander by the
stream. In all her dreams of a domain of her own always there had been
running water. And now that too was hers. One of the slow Sussex streams
moving steadily and very quietly between flowered banks, under
overhanging branches. So quietly that you did not at first realize its
strength. So quietly that you did not at first hear its song.
It was that strange and wonderful hour which comes before sunset after a
cloudless day of May sunshine, when it is as if the world had laughed,
rejoiced, and sung itself to rest in the everlasting arms. There is a
sudden hush, a peace falls, a strange silence—if you listen.
Ruth ceased to worry about Selina. She drifted along the path down the
stream, and love of the whole world folded her in a great content. A
sense of oneness with all that moved and breathed, with the little
brethren in hole and hedge, with the flowers’ lavish gift of scent and
colour, with the warmth of the sun, a oneness that fused her being with
theirs as into one perfect flame. Dear God, how good it all was, how
wonderful! The marshy ground where the kingcups and the lady smocks were
just now in all their gold and silver glory, the wild cherry, lover of
water, still in this late season blossoming among its leaves, the pool
where the kingfishers lived among the willows and river palms.
And, dreaming, she came to a greensward place where lay the stranger
dog. A dog well content, who waved a lazy tail as she came. His nose
between his paws, he watched no longer a lonely road. He watched a man.
A man in a brown suit who lay full length on the grass. Ruth could not
see his face, only the back of a curly head propped by a lean brown
hand; and he too was watching something. His absolute stillness made
Ruth draw her breath and remain motionless where she stood. No
proprietor’s fury against trespassers touched her. Perhaps because she
had walked so long on the highway, looking over walls and barred
gateways at other people’s preserves. She crept very softly forward so
that she too could see what so engrossed him. A pair of kingfishers
teaching their brood to fly.
Two had already made the great adventure and sat side by side on a
branch stretching across the pool. Even as Ruth looked, surrounded by a
flashing escort, the third joined them, and there sat all three, very
close together for courage, and distinctly puffed with pride.
The parent birds with even greater pride skimmed the surface of the
stream, wheeled and came back, like radiant jewels in the sunlight. Ruth
watched entranced. Hardly she dared to breathe. All was very still.
And then suddenly the scream of a motor siren cleft the silence like a
sword. Ruth started and turned round. When she looked again all were
gone. Man, dog and birds. Wiped out as it were in a moment. The birds’
swift flight, even the dog’s, was natural enough, but how had the
slower-moving human being so swiftly vanished? Ruth looked and, puzzled,
looked again, but the man had disappeared as completely as the
kingfishers. Then she caught sight of the dog. Saw him run across the
only visible corner of the lower field, and disappear in the direction
of the front gate. Towards the front gate also sped a small two-seated
car, down the long hill from the main road which led to the pleasant
town of Fairbridge.
Ruth felt suddenly caught up in some sequence of events outside her
consciousness. Something, she knew not what, filled her also with a
desire to reach the front gate. She ran across the plank which bridged
the stream at that point, and, taking a short cut, arrived
simultaneously with the car and the dog. And lo and behold! beside the
driver, very stiff and proud, sat Selina; the strange dog had hurled
himself into the driver’s arms, while, mysteriously sprung from
somewhere, Sarah whirled round the entire group, barking furiously.
Ruth laughed. The events were moving with extraordinary rapidity.
“Larry will have already explained my sudden appearance,” said the
driver, looking at her with a pair of humorous tired eyes over the top
of the dog’s head.
“Oh, is his name Larry?” gasped Ruth, breathless from Selina’s sudden
arrival in her arms after a scramble over the man and a takeoff from the
side of the car; “I did so want to know. Be quiet, Selina; you are a bad
dog.”
“I must explain,” said the driver gravely, “that I have not kidnapped
Selina. We stopped to water the car at Mentmore, and she got in and
refused to get out. She seemed to know what she wanted, so I brought her
along.”
“I am ever so grateful,” said Ruth; “she has been missing since twelve
o’clock, and I have been really worried.”
He nodded sympathetically.
“One never knows, does one? Larry, you rascal, let me get out. I have
been worried about Larry too. I only came home two hours ago and found
he had been missing since yesterday morning. May I introduce myself? My
name is Roger North.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Ruth, involuntarily.
It was a name world-famous in science and literature.
“Yes, _the_ Roger North! It is quite all right. People always say ‘Oh,’
like that when I introduce myself. And you are the new owner of Thorpe.”
“I am that enormously lucky person,” said Ruth. “Do come in, won’t you?
And won’t you have some tea—or something? That sounds rather vague, but
I haven’t a notion as to time.”
“Capital! Is that a usual habit of yours, or only this once?” asked this
somewhat strange person who was _the_ Roger North. “I don’t know if
you’ve noticed it, but most people seem to spend their days wondering
what time it is! And I can drink tea at any moment, thanks very much.
Take care of the car, Larry.”
Larry jumped on the seat, stretched himself at full length and became a
dog of stone.
“The car belonged to his master,” explained Roger North, as they went up
the garden path. “Larry and the car both came to me when he went to
France, and though the old dog has often run over here and had a hunt
round, this is the first time he has not come straight back to me.”
“He arrived here about six o’clock last evening,” said Ruth. “He hunted
everywhere, as you say, and then lay down and watched. I gather he spent
the night in the spare room, but this morning he had disappeared, and I
only found him again half an hour ago down by the stream. Quite happy
apparently with a man. I don’t know who the man is. He was lying by the
stream watching some kingfishers, and then your car startled us all, and
I can’t think where he disappeared to.”
North shook his head.
“I don’t know who it could have been. All the men Larry knew here left
long ago, and he doesn’t make friends readily.”
The path to the house was a real cottage-garden path, bordered thickly
with old-fashioned flowers, flowers which must have grown undisturbed
for many a long year, only thinned out, or added to, with the
forethought born of love. Memories thronged North’s mind as he looked.
He wondered what demon had induced him to come in, to accept tea. It was
unlike him. But to his relief the new owner of Thorpe made no attempt at
small talk. Indeed, she left his side, and gathered a bunch of the
pinks, whose fragrance went up like evening incense to Heaven, leaving
him to walk alone.
For Ruth Seer sensed the shadow of a great grief. It fell like a chill
across the sunlight. A sense of pity filled her. Fearing the tongue of
Miss McCox, which ceased not nor spared, she fetched the tea herself,
out on to the red-bricked pathway, facing south, and proudly called the
terrace.
Sarah and Selina had somehow crowded into the visitor’s chair and fought
for the largest space.
“I won’t apologize,” said Ruth. “That means you are a real dog lover.”
He laughed. “My wife says because they cannot answer me! How did the
little ladies take Larry’s intrusion?”
“They seemed to know he had the greater right.”
North dropped a light kiss on each black head.
“Bless you!” he said.
He drank his tea and fed the dogs shamelessly, for the most part in
silence, and Ruth watched him in the comfortable certainty that he was
quite oblivious of her scrutiny. He interested her, this man of a
world-wide fame, not because of that fame, but because her instinct told
her that between him and the late owner of Thorpe there had been a great
love. When she no longer met the glance of the humorous, tired eyes, and
the pleasant voice, talking lightly, was silent, she could see the weary
soul of the man in his face. A tragic face, tragic because it was both
powerful and hopeless. He turned to her presently and asked, “May I
light a pipe, and have a mouch round?”
Ruth nodded. She felt a sense of comradeship already between them.
“You will find me here when you come back,” she said. “This is my hour
for the newspaper.”
But though she unfolded it and spread it out, crumpling its pages in the
effort, after the fashion of women, she was not reading of “The Railway
Deadlock,” of “The Victory March of the Guards,” or of “The 1,000–Mile
Flight by British Airship,” all spread temptingly before her; she was
thinking of the man who had owned Thorpe Farm, the man whom Larry and
Roger North had loved, the man who lived for her, who had never known
him, in the woods and fields that had been his.
The first evening shadows began to fall softly; a flight of rooks cawed
home across the sky. The sounds of waking life about the farm died out
one by one.
Presently Roger North came back and sat down again, pulling hard at his
pipe. His strong dark face was full of shadows too.
“I am glad you have this place,” he said abruptly. “He would have been
glad too.”
And suddenly emboldened, Ruth asked the question that had been trembling
on her lips ever since he had come.
“Will you tell me something about him?” she said. “Lately I have so
wanted to know. It isn’t idle curiosity. I would not dare to ask you if
it were. And it would be only some one who cared that can tell me what I
want to know. Because—I don’t quite know how to explain—but I seem to
have got into touch, as it were, with the mind of the man who made and
loved this place. At first it was only that I kept wondering why he had
done this or that, if he would approve of what I was doing. But lately I
have—oh, how can I explain it?—I have a sense of awareness of him. I
_know_ in some sort of odd way, what he would do if he were still here.
And when I have carried a thing out, made some change or improvement, I
know if he is pleased. Of course I expect it sounds quite mad to you. It
isn’t even as if I had known him——”
She looked at North apologetically.
“My dear lady,” said North gently, “it is quite easily explained. You
love the place very much, that is easily seen, and you realized at once
that the previous owner had loved it too. There was evidences of that on
every hand. And it was quite natural when you were making improvements
to wonder what he would have done. It only wants a little imagination to
carry that to feeling that he was pleased when your improvements were a
success.”
Ruth smiled.
“Yes, I know. It sounds very natural as you put it. But, Mr. North, it
is more than that. How shall I explain it? My mind is in touch somehow
with another mind. It is like a conscious and quiet effortless
telepathy. Thoughts, feelings, they pass between us without any words
being necessary. It is another mind than mine which thinks, ‘It will be
better to put that field down in lucerne this year,’ when I had been
thinking of oats. But I catch the thought, and might not he catch mine?
In the same way I feel when he is pleased; that is the most certain of
all.”
Roger North shook his head.
“Such telepathy might be possible if he were alive,” he said. “We have
much to learn on those lines. But there was no doubt as to his fate. He
was killed instantaneously at Albert.”
“You do not think any communication possible after death?”
There was a pause before North answered.
“Science has no evidence of it.”
“I could not help wondering,” said Ruth diffidently, and feeling as it
were for her words, “whether this method by which what he thinks or
wishes about Thorpe seems to come to me might not possibly be the method
used for communication on some other plane in the place of speech. Words
are by no means a very good medium for expressing our thoughts, do you
think?”
“Very inadequate indeed,” agreed North. He got up as he spoke, and
passed behind her, ostensibly to knock the ashes out of his pipe against
the window-sill. When he came back to his chair he did not continue the
line of conversation.
“You asked me to tell you something of my friend, Dick Carey,” he said
as he sat down. “And at any rate what you have told me gives you, I
feel, the right to ask. There isn’t much to tell. We were at school and
college together. Charterhouse and Trinity. And we knocked about the
world a good bit together till I married. Then he took Thorpe and
settled down to farming. He loved the place, as you have discovered. And
he loved all beasts and birds. A wonderful chap with horses, clever too
on other lines, which isn’t always the case. A great reader and a bit of
a musician. He went to France with Kitchener’s first hundred thousand,
and he lived through two years of that hell. He wasn’t decorated, or
mentioned in dispatches, but I saw the men he commanded, and cared for,
and fought with. They knew. They knew what one of them called ‘the
splendid best’ of him. Oh well! I suppose he was like many another we
lost out there, but for me, when he died, it was as if a light had gone
out and all the world was a darker place.”
“Thank you,” said Ruth quite simply, yet the words said much.
There was a little pause, then he added:
“He became engaged to my daughter just before he was killed.”
“Ah!” The little exclamation held a world of pain and pity.
He felt glad she did not add the usual “poor thing,” and possibly that
was why he volunteered further. “She has married since, but I doubt if
she has got over it.”
It was some time before either spoke again. Then Ruth said, almost
shyly, “There is just one thing more. The buttercup field? I can’t quite
understand it. It is bad farming, that field. The only bit of bad
farming on the place.”
“You did not guess?”
“No.” Ruth looked at him, her head a little on one side, her brow drawn,
puzzled.
“He kept it for its beauty,” said North. “It is a wonderful bit of
colour you know, that sheeted gold,” he added almost apologetically,
when for a moment Ruth did not answer.
But she was mentally kicking herself.
“Of course!” she exclaimed. “How utterly stupid of me. I ought to have
understood. How utterly and completely stupid of me. I have never
thought of what he would wish from that point of view. I have been
simply trying to farm well. And I love that field for its beauty too.
Look at it in the western sunlight against the may hedge.”
“It was the same with the may hedges,” said North. “A fellow who came
here to buy pigs said they ought to be grubbed up, they were waste of
land. He wanted railings. He thought old Dick mad when he said he got
his value out of them to look at, and good value too.”
“I didn’t know about the hedges wasting land,” said Ruth. “But I might
have grubbed up the buttercups.”
She looked so genuinely distressed that North laughed.
“Don’t let this idea of yours get on your nerves,” he said kindly.
“Believe me it is really only what I said, and don’t worry about it. I
am glad though that you love the place so much. It would have hurt to
have it spoilt or neglected, or with some one living here who—jarred.
Indeed, to own the truth, I have been afraid to come here; I could not
face it. But now”—he paused, then ended the sentence deliberately—“I am
glad.”
“Thank you,” she said again, in that quiet simple way of hers, and for a
while they sat on in silence. The warmth was still great, the stillness
perfect, save for the occasional sleepy twitter of a bird in its nest.
Never since Dick Carey had been killed had he felt so at rest. The
burden of pain seemed to drop away. The bitterness and resentment faded.
He felt as so often in the old days, when he had come from some worry or
fret or care in the outer world or in his own home, to the peace of the
farm, to Dick’s smile, to Dick’s understanding. Almost it seemed that he
was not dead, had never gone away. And he thought of his friend, for the
first time since that telegram had come, without an anguish of pain or
longing, thought of him as he used to, when the morrow, or the next week
at least, meant the clasp of his hand, his “Hullo, old Roger,” and the
content which belongs to the mere presence only of some one or two
people alone in our journey through life.
He wisely made no attempt to analyse the why and wherefore. He
remembered with thankfulness that he had left word at home that he might
be late, and just sat on and on while peace and healing came dropping
down like dew.
And this quite marvellous woman never tried to make conversation, or
fussed about, moving things. She just sat there looking out at the
spring world as a child looks at a play that enthralls.
She had no beauty and could never have had, either of feature or
colouring, only a slender length of limb, a certain poise, small head
and hands and feet, and a light that shone behind her steady eyes. A
soul that wonders and worships shines even in our darkness. She gave the
impression of strength and of tranquillity. Her very stillness roused
him at length, and he turned to look at her.
She met the look with one of very pure friendliness.
“I hope now I have made the plunge you will let me come over here
sometimes,” he said; “somehow I think we are going to be friends.”
“I think we are friends already,” she said, smiling, “and I am very
glad. One or two of the neighbours have called and asked me to tea
parties. But I have lived such a different life. Except for those who
farm or garden we haven’t much in common.”
“You have always lived on the land?” he asked.
“Oh _no_!” she laughed, looking at him with amusement. “I lived all my
life until I was seventeen at Parson’s Green, and after that in a little
street at the back of Tottenham Court Road, until the outbreak of war.
And then I was for four years in Belgium and Northern France, cooking.”
“Good heavens! And all the time this was what you wanted!”
“Yes, this was what I wanted. I didn’t know. But this was it. And think
of the luck of getting it!” She looked at him triumphantly. “The amazing
wonderful luck! I feel as if I ought to be on my knees, figuratively,
all the time, giving thanks.”
“Of course,” said Roger North slowly. “That _is_ your mental attitude.
No wonder you are so unusual a person. And how about the years that have
gone before?”
“I sometimes wonder,” she said, thinking, “since I have come here of
course, whether every part of our lives isn’t arranged definitely, with
a purpose, to prepare us for the next part. It would help a bit through
the bad times as well as the good, if one knew it was so, don’t you
think?”
“I daresay,” Roger North answered vaguely, as was his fashion, Ruth soon
discovered, if questioned on such things. “I wish you would tell me
something of yourself. What line you came up along would really interest
me quite a lot. And it isn’t idle curiosity either.”
There was a little silence.
“I should like to tell you,” she said at length.
But she was conscious at the back of her mind that some one else was
interested too, and it was that some one else whom she wanted most of
all to tell.