Then the remembrance of the dark ordeal that lay before her came. It was like waking to the morning that was to see one on the scaffold: but, with something of the light detachment that a condemned prisoner might feel—nothing being left to hope for and the only strength demanded being the passive strength to endure—she found that she was thinking more of the sky and of the birds than of the ordeal. Some hours lay between her and that; bright, beautiful hours.
She put out her hand and took her watch which lay near. Only six. Augustine would not expect to see her until ten. Four long hours: she must get up and spend them out of doors.
It was too early for hot water or maids; she enjoyed the flowing shocks of the cold and her own rapidity and skill in dressing and coiling up her hair. She put on her black dress and took her black scarf as a covering for her head. Slipping out noiselessly, like a truant school-girl, she made her way to the pantry, found milk and bread, and ate and drank standing, then, cautiously pushing bolts and bars, stepped from the door into the dew, the sunlight, the keen young air.
She took the path to the left that led through the sycamore wood, and crossing the narrow brook by a little plank and hand rail, passed into the meadows where, in Spring, she and Augustine used to pick cowslips.
She thought of Augustine, but only in that distant past, as a little child, and her mind dwelt on sweet, trivial memories, on the toys he had played with and the pair of baby-shoes, bright red shoes, square-toed, with rosettes on them, that she had loved to see him wear with his little white frocks. And in remembering the shoes she smiled again, as she had smiled in hearing the noisy chirpings of the waking birds.
The little path ran on through meadow after meadow, stiles at the hedges, planks over the brooks and ditches that intersected this flat, pastoral country. She paused for a long time to watch the birds hopping and fluttering in a line of sapling willows that bordered one of these brooks and at another stood and watched a water-rat, unconscious of her nearness, making his morning toilette on the bank; he rubbed his ears and muzzle hastily, with the most amusing gesture. Once she left the path to go close to some cows that were grazing peacefully; their beautiful eyes, reflecting the green pastures, looked up at her with serenity, and she delighted in the fragrance that exhaled from their broad, wet nostrils.
"Darlings," she found herself saying.
She went very far. She crossed the road that, seen from Charlock House, was, with its bordering elm-trees, only a line of blotted blue. And all the time the light grew more splendid and the sun rose higher in the vast dome of the sky.
She returned more slowly than she had gone. It was like a dream this walk, as though her spirit, awake, alive to sight and sound, smiling and childish, were out under the sky, while in the dark, sad house the heavily throbbing heart waited for its return.
This waiting heart seemed to come out to meet her as once more she saw the sycamores dark on the sky and saw beyond them the low stone house. The pearly, the crystalline interlude, drew to a close. She knew that in passing from it she passed into deep, accepted tragedy.