REYNOLD'S RESOLUTION.
Meanwhile the young people had passed through the great gate and turned
to the right. "Do you mind which way you go?" Barbara asked, and Reynold
replied that he left it entirely to her. "Then," she said, "we will go
this way, and come back by the village; you will get a better view so."
At first, however, it seemed that a view was the one thing which was
certainly not to be had in the road they had chosen. On their left was a
tangled hedge, on their right a dank and dripping plantation of firs.
The slim, straight stems, seen one beyond another, conveyed to Reynold
the impression of a melancholy crowd, pressing silently to the boundary
of the road on which he walked. It was one of those fantastic pictures
which reveal themselves in unfamiliar landscapes, and Barbara, who had
seen the wood under a score of varying aspects, took no especial heed of
this one, as she picked her way daintily by the young man's side. Indeed
she did not even note the moment when the trees were succeeded by a
turnip-field, lying wide and wet under the pale sky. But when in its
turn the field gave place to an open gateway and a drive full of deep
ruts, in which the water stood, she paused. "You see that house?" she
said.
It was evident from its surroundings of soaked yard, miscellaneous
buildings, dirty tumbrils, and clustered stacks, that it was a
farmhouse. Harding looked at it and turned inquiringly to her. "It was
much larger once," said Barbara. "Part of it was pulled down a long
while ago. Your people lived here before they built Mitchelhurst Place."
He pushed out his lower lip. "Well," he said, "I think they showed their
good taste in getting out of this."
"But it was better then," said the girl. "And even now, sometimes in the
spring when I come here for cowslips----"
She stopped short, for he was smiling. "Oh, no doubt! Everything looks
better then. But I have come too late." He had to step aside as he spoke
to let a manure cart go by, labouring along the miry way. "And what do
you call this house?" he asked.
"Mitchelhurst Hall. I don't think there is anything much to see, but if
you would like to look over it or to walk round it----"
"No, thank you; I am content." He took off his hat in mocking homage to
the home of the Rothwells, and turned to go. "And have you any more
decayed residences to show me, Miss Strange?"
"Only some graves," she answered, simply.
"Oh, they are all graves!" said Harding with his short laugh, swinging
his umbrella as they resumed their walk. Already Barbara had become
accustomed to that little jarring laugh, which had no merriment in it.
She did not like it, but she was curiously impressed by it. When the
young man was grave and stiff and shy she was sorry for him; she
remembered that he was only Mr. Reynold Harding, their guest for a week.
But when he was sufficiently at his ease to laugh she felt as if all the
Rothwells were mocking, and she were the interloper and inferior.
"I suppose it does seem like that to you--as if they were all graves,"
she said timidly, as she led the way across the road to a gate in the
tangled hedge; the field into which it led sloped steeply down. "That
is what people call the best view of Mitchelhurst," she explained.
To the left was Mitchelhurst Place, gaunt and white among its warped and
weather-beaten trees. Before them lay the dotted line of Mitchelhurst
Street, and they looked down into the square cabbage-plots. The sails of
the windmill swung heavily round, and the smoke went up from the
blacksmith's forge. To the right was the church, with its thickset
tower, and the sun shining feebly on the wet surface of its leaden roof.
Barbara pointed out a small oblong patch of grass and evergreens as the
vicarage garden, while a bare building, of the rawest red brick, was the
Mitchelhurst workhouse. The view was remarkably comprehensive.
Mitchelhurst lay spread below them in small and melancholy completeness.
"Yes, it's all there, right enough," said Reynold, leaning on the gate.
"An excellent view. All there, from the Place where my people spent
their money, to the workhouse, where----By Jove!" his voice dropped
suddenly, "I'm not Rothwell enough to have a right to be taken into the
Mitchelhurst workhouse! They'd send me on somewhere, I suppose. I wonder
which they would call my parish!"
"Are you sorry?" Barbara asked, after a pause.
"Sorry not to be in the workhouse?" indicating it with a slight movement
of his finger. "No, not particularly."
"I didn't mean that," said the girl, a little shortly. "I meant, of
course, are you sorry you are not a Rothwell?"
"I don't know."
He spoke slowly, half reluctantly, and still leaned on the gate, with
his eyes wandering from point to point of the little landscape, which
was softened and saddened by the pale light and paler haze of October.
It was Barbara who finally broke the silence. "You didn't like the
house this morning, and you didn't like the old hall just now, so I
thought most likely you wouldn't care for this."
"Well, it isn't beautiful," he replied, without turning his head. "Do
you care much about it, Miss Strange? Why should anybody care about it?
There are wonderful places in the world--beautiful places full of
sunshine. Why should we trouble ourselves about this little grey and
green island where we happened to be born? And what are these few acres
in it more than any other bit of ploughed land and meadow?"
"I thought you didn't care for it," said Barbara, sagely. "I thought you
scorned it."
"Scorn it--I can't scorn it! It isn't mine!" He turned away from it, as
if in a sudden movement of impatience, and lounged with his back to the
gate. "It's like my luck!" he said, kicking a stone in the road.
Barbara was interested. Harding's tone revealed the strength and
bitterness of his feelings. He had never seemed to her so much of a
Rothwell as he did at that moment. "What is like your luck?" she
ventured to ask.
He jerked his head in the direction of Mitchelhurst. "I may as well be
honest," he said. "Honest with myself--if I can! Look there--I have
mocked at that place all my life; for very shame's sake I have kept away
from it because I had vowed I didn't care whether one stone of it was
left upon another. What was it to me? I am not a Rothwell. I'm Reynold
Harding, son of Sidney Harding, son of Reynold Harding--there my
pedigree grows vague. My grandfather is an important man--we can't get
beyond him. He died while my father was in petticoats. He was a
pork-butcher in a small way. I believe he could write his name--_my_
name--and that he always declared that his father was a Reynold too. But
we don't know anything about my great-grandfather--perhaps he was a
pork-butcher in a smaller way. My uncle Robert went to London as a boy
and made all the money, pensioned his father, and afterwards educated
his half-brother Sidney, who was twenty years younger than himself. He
would have made my father his partner if he had lived. If my father had
lived I might have been rich. As it is, I'm not rich, and I'm not a
Rothwell."
"Well, you look like one!" said Barbara. She was not very wise. It
seemed to her a cruel thing that this earlier Reynold should have been a
pork-butcher--a misfortune on which she would not comment. She looked up
at the younger Reynold with the sincerest sympathy shining in her eyes,
and in an unreasoning fashion of her own took part with him and with the
old family, as if his grandfather were an unwarranted intruder who had
thrust himself into their superior society. "You look like one!" she
exclaimed, and Reynold smiled.
"And after all," she said, pursuing her train of thought, "you are half
Rothwell, you know. As much Rothwell as Harding, are you not?"
He was still smiling. "True. But that is a kind of thing which doesn't
do by halves."
She assented with a sigh. She had never before talked to a man whose
grandfather was a pork-butcher, and she did not know what consolation to
offer. She could only look shyly and wistfully at Mr. Harding, as he
leaned against the gate with his back to the prospect, while she
resolved that she would never tell her uncle. She did not think her
companion less interesting after the revelation. This discord, this
irony of fate, this mixing of the blood of the Rothwells and the small
tradesman, seemed to her to explain much of young Harding's sullen
discontent. He was the last descendant of the old family of which she
had dreamed so often, and he was the victim of an unmerited wrong. She
wanted him to say more. "And you wouldn't come to Mitchelhurst before?"
she said, suggestively.
"No; but the thought of the place was pulling at me all the time. I
couldn't get rid of it. And so--here I am! And I have seen the dream of
my life face to face--it's behind my back just at this minute, but I can
see it as well as if I were looking at it. I'm very grateful to you for
showing me this view, Miss Strange, but you'll excuse me if I don't turn
round while I speak of it?"
"Oh, yes," said Barbara, wonderingly.
He had his elbows on the top rail of the gate, and looked downward at
the muddy way, rough with the hoof marks of cattle. "You see," he
explained, "I want to say the kind of thing one says behind a--a
landscape's back."
"I'm sorry to hear it," she answered. She had drawn a little to one
side, and had laid a small gloved hand on one of the gate posts.
Somebody, many years before, had deeply cut a clumsy M on the cracked
and roughened surface of the wood. The letter was as grey and as
weather-worn as the rest. Barbara touched it delicately with a
finger-tip, and followed its ungainly outline. Probably it was his own
initial that the rustic had hacked, standing where he stood, but she
recognised the possibility that the rough carving might be the utterance
of the great secret of joy and pain, and the touch was almost a caress.
"Some people follow their dreams through life, and never get more than a
glimpse of them, even as dreams," said Harding, slowly. "Well, I have
seen mine. I have had a good look at it. I know what it is like. It is
dreary--it is narrow--cold--hideous."
"Oh!" cried Barbara, as if his words hurt her. Then, recovering herself,
"I'm sorry you dislike it so much. Well, you must give it up, mustn't
you?"
He laughed. "Life without a fancy, without a desire?" he said.
"Find something else to wish for."
"What? If there were anything else, should I care twopence for
Mitchelhurst? No, it is my dream still--a dream I'm never likely to
realise, but the only possible dream for me. Only now I know how poor
and dull my highest success would be."
"You had better have stayed away," said the girl.
He took his elbows off the gate, and bowed in acknowledgment of the
polite speech. "Oh, you know what I mean," she said hurriedly.
"Yes, I know. And, except for the kindness of your fairy godmother, I
believe you are perfectly right. _That_, of course, is a different
question."
Barbara would not answer what she fancied might be a sneer. "You see the
place at its worst," she said, "and there is nobody to care for it;
everything is neglected and going to ruin. Don't you think it would be
different if it belonged to some one who loved it? Why don't you make
your fortune," she exclaimed, with sanguine, bright-eyed directness, as
if the fortune were an easy certainty, "and come back and set everything
right? Don't you think you could care for Mitchelhurst if----"
She would have finished her sentence readily enough, but Reynold caught
it up.
"_If!_" he said, with a sudden startled significance in his tone. Then,
with an air of prompt deference, "Shall I go and make the fortune at
once, Miss Strange? Shall I? Yes, I think I could care for Mitchelhurst,
as you say, _if_--" He smiled. "One might do much with a fortune, no
doubt."
"Make it then," said Barbara, conscious of a faint and undefined
embarrassment.
"Must it be a very big one?"
"Oh, I think it may as well be a tolerable size, while you are about it.
Hadn't we better be moving on?"
Mr. Harding assented. "Where are we going now?"
"To the church. That is, if you care to go there."
"Oh, I like to go very much. I wonder what you would call a tolerable
fortune," he said in a meditative tone.
"My opinion doesn't matter."
"But you are going to wish me success while I am away making it?"
"Oh, certainly."
"That will be a help," he said gravely. "I shan't look for an omen in
the sky just now--do you see how threatening it is out yonder?"
The clouds rolled heavily upwards, and massed themselves above their
heads as they hastened down a steep lane which brought them out by the
church. Barbara stopped at the clerk's cottage for a ponderous key, and
then led the way through a little creaking gate. The path along which
they went was like a narrow ditch, the mould, heaped high on either
side, seemed as if it were burdened with his imprisoned secrets. The
undulating graves, overgrown with coarse grasses, rose up, wave-like,
against the buttressed walls of the churchyard, high above the level of
the outer road. The church itself looked as if it had been dug out of
the sepulchral earth, so closely was it surrounded by these shapeless
mounds. Barbara, to whom the scene was nothing new, and who was eager to
escape the impending shower, flitted, alive, warm, and young, through
all this cold decay, and never heeded it. Harding followed her, looking
right and left. They passed under two dusky yew trees, and then she
thrust her big key into the lock of the south door.
"Are my people buried in the churchyard?" he asked.
"Oh, no!" she exclaimed reverentially. "Your people are all inside."
He stepped in, but when he was about to close the door he stood for a
moment, gazing out through the low-browed arch. It framed a picture of
old-fashioned headstones fallen all aslant, nettles flourishing upon
forgotten graves, the trunks of the great yews, the weed-grown crest of
the churchyard wall, defined with singular clearness upon a wide band of
yellow sky. The gathered tempest hung above, and its deepening menace
intensified the pale tranquillity of the horizon. "I say," said Harding
as he turned away, "it's going to pour, you know!"
"Well, we are under shelter," Barbara answered cheerfully, as she laid
her key on the edge of one of the pews. "If it clears up again so that
we get back in good time it won't matter a bit. And anyhow we've got
umbrellas. The font is very old, they say."
Harding obediently inspected the font.
"And there are two curious inscriptions on tablets on the north wall.
Mr. Pryor--he's the vicar--is always trying to read them. Do you know
much about such things?"
"Nothing at all."
"Oh!" in a tone of disappointment. "I'm afraid you wouldn't get on with
Mr. Pryor then."
"I'm afraid not."
"Perhaps you wouldn't care to look at them."
"Oh, let us look, by all means."
They walked together up the aisle. "_I_ don't care about them," said
Barbara, "but I suppose Mr. Pryor would die happy if he could make them
out."
"Then I suspect he is happy meanwhile, though perhaps he doesn't know
it," Reynold replied, looking upward at the half effaced lettering.
"He can read some of it," said the girl, "but nobody can make out the
interesting part."
Harding laughed, under his breath. Their remarks had been softly uttered
ever since the closing of the door had shut them in to the imprisoned
silence. He moved noiselessly a few steps further, and looked round.
Mitchelhurst Church, like Mitchelhurst Place, betrayed a long neglect.
The pavement was sunken and uneven, cobwebs hung from the sombre arches,
the walls, which had once been white, were stained and streaked, by damp
and time, to a blending of melancholy hues. The half light, which
struggled through small panes of greenish glass, fell on things
blighted, tarnished, faded, dim. The pews with their rush-matted seats
were worm-eaten, the crimson velvet of the pulpit was a dingy rag. There
was but one bit of vivid modern colouring in the whole building--a slim
lancet window at the west end, a discord sharply struck in the shadowy
harmony. "To the memory of the vicar before last," said Barbara, when
the young man's glance fell on it. Such gleams of sunlight as lingered
yet in the stormy sky without irradiated Michael, the church's patron
saint, in the act of triumphing over a small dragon. The contest
revealed itself as a mere struggle for existence; a Quaker, within such
narrow limits, must have fought for the upper hand as surely as an
archangel. Harding as he looked at it could not repress a sigh. He fully
appreciated the calmness of the saint, and the neatness with which the
little dragon was coiled, but it seemed to him a pity that the vicar
before last had happened to die; and he was glad to turn his back on the
battle, and follow Miss Strange to the north chancel aisle. "These are
all the Rothwell monuments," she said. "Their vault is just below. This
is their pew, where we sit on Sunday."
Having said this she moved from his side, and left him gazing at the
simple tablets which recorded the later generations of the old house,
and the elaborate memorials of more prosperous days. More than one
recumbent figure slept there, each with upturned face supported on a
carven pillow; the bust of a Rothwell was set up in a dusty niche, with
lean features peering out of a forest of curling marble hair; carefully
graduated families of Rothwells, boys and girls, knelt behind their
kneeling parents; the little window, half blocked by the florid grandeur
of a grimy monument, had the Rothwell arms emblazoned on it in a dim
richness of colour. In this one spot the dreariness of the rest of the
building became a stately melancholy. Harding looked down. His foot was
resting on the inscribed stone which marked the entrance to that silent,
airless place of skeletons and shadows, compared to which even this dim
corner, with its mute assemblage, was yet the upper world of light and
life. If he worked, if fortune favoured him, if he succeeded beyond all
reasonable hope, if he were indeed predestined to triumph, that little
stone might one day be lifted for him.
The windows darkened momentarily with the coming of the tempest. Through
the dim diamond panes the masses of the yew-trees were seen, and their
movement was like the stirring of vast black wings. The effigies of the
dead men frowned in the deepening gloom, and their young descendant
folded his arms, and leaned against the high pew, with a slant gleam of
light on his pale Rothwell face. Barbara went restlessly and yet
cautiously up and down the central aisle, and paused by the reading-desk
to turn the leaves of the great old-fashioned prayer-book which lay
there. When its cover was lifted it exhaled a faint odour, as of the
dead Sundays of a century and more. While she lingered, lightly
conscious of the lapse of vague years, reading petitions for the welfare
of "Thy servant _GEORGE_, our most gracious King and Governour," "her
Royal Highness the Princess Dowager of _Wales_, and all the Royal
Family," the page grew indistinct in the threatening twilight, as if it
would withdraw itself from her idle curiosity. She looked up with a
shiver, as overhead and around burst the multitudinous noises of the
storm, the rain gushing on the leaden roof, the water streaming drearily
from the gutters to beat on the earth below, and, in a few moments, the
quick, monotonous fall of drops through a leak close by. This lasted for
ten minutes or a quarter of an hour. Then the sky grew lighter, the
downpour slackened, a sense of overshadowing oppression seemed to pass
away, and St. Michael and his dragon brightened cheerfully. Barbara went
to the door and threw it open, and a breath of fresh air came in with a
chilly smell of rain.
As she stood in the low archway she heard Harding's step on the
pavement behind her. It was more alert and decided than usual, and when
she turned he met her glance with a smile.
"Well?" she said. "I didn't like to disturb you, you looked so serious."
"I was thinking," he admitted. "And it was a rather serious occasion. My
people are not very cheerful company."
"And now you have thought?"
"Yes," he said, still smiling. "Yes, I have thought--seriously, with my
serious friends yonder."
Barbara, as she stood, with her fingers closed on the heavy handle of
the door, and her face turned towards Harding, fixed her eyes intently
on his.
"I know!" she exclaimed. "You have made up your mind to come back to
Mitchelhurst."
"Who knows?" said he. "I'm not sanguine, but we'll see what time and
fortune have to say to it. At any rate my people are patient
enough--they'll wait for me!"
To the girl, longing for a romance, the idea of the young man's
resolution was delightful. She looked at him with a little quivering
thrill of impatience, as if she would have had him do something towards
the great end that very moment. Her small, uplifted face was flushed,
and her eyes were like stars. The brightening light outside shone on the
soft brown velvet of her dress, and something in her eager,
lightly-poised attitude gave Reynold the impression of a dainty
brown-plumaged, bright-eyed bird, ready for instant flight. He almost
stretched an instinctive hand to grasp and detain her, lest she should
loose her hold of the iron ring and be gone.
"I know you will succeed--you will come back!" she exclaimed. "How long
first, I wonder?"
"_Shall_ I succeed?" said Reynold, half to himself, but
half-questioning her to win the sweet, unconscious assurance, which
meant so little, yet mocked so deep a meaning.
"Yes!" she replied. "You will! You must be master here."
Master! She might have put it in a dozen different ways, and found no
word to waken the swift, meaning flash in his eyes which that word did.
Her pulses did not quicken, she perfectly understood that he was
thinking of Mitchelhurst. She could not understand what mere dead earth
and stone Mitchelhurst was to the man at her side.
"You will have to restore the church one of these days," she said.
Harding nodded.
"Certainly. But it will be very ugly, anyhow."
"Well, at least you must have the roof mended. And now, please, will you
get the key? It is on the ledge of that pew just across the aisle. I
think we had better be going--it has almost left off raining."
She stepped outside and put up her umbrella, while he locked up his
ancestors, smiling grimly. It seemed rather unnecessary to turn the key
on the family party in that dusty little corner. They were quiet folks,
and, as he had said, they would wait for him and his fortune not
impatiently. If he could have shut in the brightness of youth, the
warmth and life and sweetness which alone could make the fortune worth
having, if he could have come back in the hour of success to unfasten
the door and find all there--then indeed his big key would have been a
priceless talisman. Unfortunately one can shut nothing safely away that
is not dead. The old Rothwells were secure enough, but the rest was at
the mercy of time and change, and all the winds that blow.
The pair were silent as they turned into Mitchelhurst Street. Reynold
looked at the small, shabby houses, and noted the swinging sign of the
"Rothwell Arms," though his deeper thoughts were full of other things.
But about half way through the village he awoke to a sudden
consciousness of eyes. Eyes peered through small-paned windows, stared
boldly from open doorways, met him inquisitively in the faces of
loiterers on the path, or were lifted from the dull task of mending the
road as he walked by with Barbara. He looked over his shoulder and found
that other people were looking over their shoulders, after which he felt
himself completely encompassed.
"People here seem interested," he remarked to Miss Strange, while a
pale-faced, slatternly girl, with swiftly-plaiting fingers, leaned
forward to get a better view.
"Why, of course they are interested. You are a stranger, you know. It
is quite an excitement for them."
"You call that an excitement?" said he.
"Yes. If you spent your life straw-plaiting in one of these cottages you
would be excited if a stranger went by. It would be kinder of you if you
did not walk so fast."
"No, no," said Harding, quickening his steps. "I don't profess
philanthropy."
"Besides, you are not altogether a stranger," she went on. "I dare say
they think you are one of the old family come to buy up the property."
"Why should they think anything of the kind?" he demanded incredulously.
"Well, they know you are staying at the Place. Every child in the street
knows that. And, you see, Mr. Harding, nobody comes to Mitchelhurst
without some special reason, so perhaps they have a right to be curious.
I remember how they stared a few months ago--it was at a gentleman who
was just walking down the road----"
"Indeed," said Harding. "And what was _his_ special reason for coming? I
suppose," he added quickly, "I've as good a right to be curious as other
Mitchelhurst people."
"Oh, I don't know. He was a friend of Uncle Herbert's--he came to see
him."
"And did _he_ walk slowly from motives of pure kindness?" the young man
persisted.
"Yes," said Barbara defiantly. "He stood stock still and looked at the
straw plaiting. I don't know about the kindness; perhaps he liked it."
"Well, I don't like it."
"But you needn't take such very long steps: these three cottages are the
last. Do you know I'm very nearly running?"
Of course he slackened his pace and begged her pardon; but in so doing
he relapsed into the uneasy self-consciousness of their first
interview. When they reached the gate of the avenue he held it open for
her to pass, murmuring something about walking a bit further. Barbara
looked at him in surprise, and then, with a little smiling nod, went
away under the trees, wondering what was amiss. "I can't have offended
him--how could I?" she said to herself, and she made up her mind that
her new friend was certainly queer. It was the Rothwell temper, no
doubt, and yet his awkward muttering had been more like the manner of a
sullen schoolboy. A Rothwell should have been loftily superior, even if
he were disagreeable. It was true, as Barbara reflected, almost in spite
of herself, that Mr. Harding had no such hereditary obligation on the
pork-butcher side of his pedigree.
Reynold had spoken out of the bitterness of his heart, and a bitter
frankness is the frankest of all. But perhaps he had not shown his
wisdom when he so quickly confided his grandfather to Miss Strange.
Because we may have tact enough to choose the mood in which our friend
shall listen to our secret, we are a little too apt to forget that the
secret, once uttered, remains with him in all his moods. In this case
the girl had been a sympathetic listener, but young Harding scarcely
intended that the elder Reynold should be so vividly realised.
Later, when all outside the windows was growing blank and black, Barbara
went up to dress for dinner. She was nearly ready when there came a
knock at her door, and she hurried, candle in hand, to open it. In the
gloom of the passage stood the red-armed village girl who waited on her.
"Please, miss, the gentleman told me to give you this," said the
messenger, awkwardly offering something which was only a formless mass
in the darkness.
"What?" said Miss Strange, and turned the light upon it. The wavering
little illumination fell on a confusion of autumn leaves, rich with
their dying colours, and shining with rain. Among them, indistinctly,
were berries of various kinds, hips and haws, and poison clusters of a
deeper red, vanishing for a moment as the draught blew the candle flame
aside, and then reappearing. One might have fancied them blood drops
newly shed on the wet foliage.
"Oh!" Barbara exclaimed in surprise, and after a moment's pause, "give
them to me." She gathered them up, despite some thorny stems, with her
disengaged hand, and went back into her room. So that was the meaning of
Mr. Harding's solitary walk! She stood by the table, delicately picking
out the most vivid clusters, and trying their effect against the soft
cloud of her hair, cloudier than ever in the dusk of her mirror. "I
hope he hasn't been slipping into any more ditches!" she said to
herself.
With that she sighed, for the thought recalled to her the melancholy of
an autumnal landscape. She remembered an earlier gift, roses and myrtle,
a summer gift, the giver of which had gone when the summer waned. She
had seen him last on a hot September day. "We never said good-bye,"
Barbara thought, and let her hand hang with the berries in it. "He said
he should not go till the beginning of October. When he came that
afternoon and I was out, and he only saw uncle, I was sure he would come
again. Well, I suppose he didn't care to. He could if he liked--a girl
can't; there are lots of things a girl can't do; but a man can call if
he pleases. Well, he must have gone away before now. And he didn't even
write a line, he only sent a message by uncle, his kind regards--Who
wants his kind regards?--and he was sorry not to see me. Very well, my
kind regards, and I'm sure I don't want to see him!"
She ended her meditations with an emphatic little nod, but the girl in
the mirror who returned it had such a defiantly pouting face that she
quite took Barbara by surprise.
"I'm not angry," Miss Strange declared to herself after a pause. "Not
the least in the world. The idea is perfectly absurd. It was just a bit
of the summer, and now the summer is gone." And so saying she put Mr.
Harding's autumn berries in her hair, and fastened them at her throat,
and, with her candle flickering dimly through the long dark passages,
swept down to the yellow drawing-room to thank him for his gift.