“But why?”
“I can’t tell you, really. It’s rather an odd feeling. Would you much sooner not?”
It flashed into Mrs. Millicent’s mind that perhaps she had been unwise in allowing her own shrinking timidity to influence the girl. The only reason she had to put forward sounded a little too personal to carry much weight, and if time was healing the wound in Jean’s heart, should she not be thankful—and show it?
“Very well, dear,” she said slowly. “Perhaps it is better to begin this way. I think I’d like your arm.”
They went on thus, with unvoiced recognition of remembered things. Came the bend in the lane beyond which lay Beech Lodge, and the older woman seemed to feel the knife in her own throat. So many times had she walked here, and so happily. The dip in the hedge, the glimpse of rolling fields patched with woodland, the belt of timber that marked the grounds of Beech Lodge, the cluster of old trees with their pale gray trunks close by the roadside; then the white gates and tiny red-roofed cottage. Her fingers tightened on the girl’s strong arm.
“My dear, my dear,” she whispered. “Just two years ago!”
Jean nodded sympathetically but did not speak. She was staring up the drive at the house with its shining windows, its clustering ivy, and the wide door, in every timber of which seemed to be a welcome.
“Isn’t it strange?” she whispered. “So different, and yet so unchanged.” She paused, then went on uncertainly. “I sometimes wonder, mother, whether houses have some kind of consciousness and are aware of us who live in them. Isn’t it queer, but I feel now as though Beech Lodge was somehow glad to see us, and was wondering why we had never come before.”
Mrs. Millicent shook her head. “It’s a pretty fancy, child, but—”
Jean stopped, nearly opposite the white gates. “Who’s that at the window—your old room? Mother, it looks like Perkins!”