She would not see him again that day. Dan was going to dine with him at
the Buck Hotel.
When Dan came back from Reyburn he said he wouldn't go. He had a
headache. If Vickers could have a headache, so could he. He sulked all
evening in the smoking-room by himself; but towards nine o'clock he
thought better of it and went round, he said, to look Vickers up.
Her mother yawned over her book; and the yawns made her impatient; she
wanted to be out of doors, walking, instead of sitting there listening to
Mamma.
At nine o'clock Mamma gave one supreme yawn and dragged herself to bed.
She went out through the orchard into the Back Lane. She could see Nannie
Learoyd sitting on the stone stairs of Horn's granary, waiting for young
Horn to come round the corner of his yard. Perhaps they would go up into
the granary and hide under the straw. She turned into the field track to
the schoolhouse and the highway. In the dark bottom the river lay like a
broad, white, glittering road.
She stopped by the schoolhouse, considering whether she would go up to
the moor by the high fields and come back down the lane, or go up the
lane and come back down the fields.
"Too dark to find the gaps if I come back by the fields." She had
forgotten the hidden moon.
There was a breaking twilight when she reached the lane. She came down at
a swinging stride. Her feet went on the grass borders without a sound.
At the last crook of the lane she came suddenly on a man and woman
standing in her path by the stone wall. It would be Nannie Learoyd and
young Horn. They were fixed in one block, their faces tilted backwards,
their bodies motionless. The woman's arms were round the man's neck, his
arms round her waist. There was something about the queer back-tilted
faces--queer and ugly.
As she came on she saw them break loose from each other and swing apart:
Nannie Learoyd and Lindley Vickers.