Arrived at the little countryside station, a six-mile drive from The Chestnuts, she seated herself on a bench to await the train from London, and gazed vacantly at the white palings, at the dazzling herbaceous border, butterflies floating above it. She felt sorely oppressed, but more from a sense of misfortune than from shame or repentance. How unlucky she was! The future held nothing enjoyable; she saw herself living on at The Chestnuts indefinitely. Grandmamma might die some day, but she and the aunts would grow older and older, and they would all continue to sing in church that they dared not choose their lot, and would not if they might. Stella remembered the case of Miss Spurt, the only daughter of a clergyman in a neighbouring parish, who, two or three years back, had run away with her father's groom-gardener. The scandal had petrified the county; whispers of it had reached Stella's sharp ears, though the subject was never mentioned in her presence at The Chestnuts. Now she wondered what had become of Miss Spurt, and she even began to sympathise with the poor girl's mad action.
Supposing she herself were driven to do the same sort of thing; to elope, for example, with the solitary porter who stood leaning against the waiting-room wall, should he suggest such a desperate step! She regarded him with idle attention, feeling stupefied with the prevailing somnolence of the station, the heat of the shadeless, empty platform; he was a fresh-looking boy, with a cap on the back of his head and a curl of glistening hair plastered to his forehead. Suddenly he stood erect, stretched his arms, gave a loud yawn, and seized a handbell that he rang with deafening clamour. So here was the train at last, thank goodness!
One or two people hurried, perspiring, breathless, on to the platform; a few more ran over the rails from the opposite side, there being no footbridge; the station-master emerged from his office and took up a commanding position. The train rumbled in.
During the long, hot journey from London, Colonel Crayfield had been repenting his good-natured acquiescence to what seemed to him a rather exacting, inconsiderate request. At first his fancy had been tickled by the notion that he, an elderly bachelor, should present himself in this semi-parental rôle; also he was anxious to see the little girl, his godchild, who apparently threatened to follow in her mother's footsteps, though from what he remembered of Charles Carrington, she was more likely to have inherited unstable tendencies from her father! Charles had always been foolish and weak where affairs of the heart were concerned; but in his final "affair," with the young wife of a singularly unsuitable husband, he was certainly more to be pitied than blamed. That time he had really been done for, and he had behaved well in the circumstances; he, Colonel Crayfield, had stood by the guilty pair, and helped Charles to change his regiment, had consented to be sponsor to the unwelcome child. But, with the usual result of good-natured actions, it seemed that his responsibilities were never to end; and partly for the sake of Charles Carrington's memory, partly to satisfy a newly aroused interest, here he was on his way to give counsel to three old prudes in the matter of a naughty girl who had got into a scrape at school! What form this counsel was to take he had not the remotest idea; he knew nothing about schoolgirls; probably it was all a storm in a teacup. What on earth had persuaded him to waste his time in such useless fashion!
As he stepped out of the train in company with a few women bearing market baskets and a sprinkling of farmers wearing breeches and gaiters, he wished again that he had not yielded to sentiment and curiosity; visits bored him; he had been bored on the last occasion, ten years ago, when he had gone on duty to The Chestnuts. He remembered the ordeal well: Charles's formal, austere old mother, his uninteresting sisters, the undrinkable wine, Charles's child of six or seven years old, who had sniffed and fidgeted and refused to make friends, and was no different from other children of her age; he even remembered that the village was a long distance from the station, and he hoped that neither of the Carrington spinsters had come to the station to meet him.
Stella, standing expectant on the platform, saw a powerful-looking man, clean shaven, blunt-featured, inclined to stoutness, who moved ponderously—rather like a big Chinaman, a mandarin. As she stepped forward he stared at her, and the stare gave her an odd feeling of shyness. She would have to introduce herself; he did not know that she was to meet him at the station. He was not at all what she had expected; she had pictured a fussy old person with a protruding stomach, a beard, and spectacles!
Colonel Crayfield was equally taken aback. His experienced glance had been instantly arrested by the vision of a remarkably good-looking girl, tall and slim, who, though her skirt only reached to her ankles, whose hair was tied back with a large ribbon bow, was clearly no child; and he had gazed at the vision as he would hardly have permitted himself to gaze had he realised that the girl was his goddaughter! All the same, the situation entertained him; he no longer wished he had refused to respond to Miss Carrington's appeal.
Colonel Crayfield raised his hat. "Then you are Stella—my godchild? How d'ye do, Stella?"
The radiant brown eyes met his own. What an unnecessarily pretty creature; no wonder there had been trouble connected with boys!