At the Priory little Hilda Archinard was suffering in her way—the dreary suffering of childhood, with its sense of hopeless finality, of helpless inexperience. Chasms of desolation deepened within her as she heard that her friend was going away.
The sudden blossoming of her devotion to Odd had widened her capabilities for conscious loneliness. Her loneliness became apparent to her, and the immense place his smile, his kindness, her confident sense of his goodness had filled in her dreaming little life. Her aching pity for him was confused by a vague terror for herself. She could hardly bear the thought of his departure. Every day she walked all along the hedges and walls that divided the Priory from the Manor estate; but she never saw him. The thought of not seeing him again, which at first had seemed impossible, now fixed upon her as a haunting obsession.
“Odd goes to-morrow,” the Captain announced one evening in the drawing-room. Katherine was playing, not very conscientiously but rather cleverly, a little air by Grieg. Hilda had a book on her lap, but she was not reading, and her father’s words seemed to stop her heart in its heavy beating.
“I met Thompson”—Mr. Thompson was Peter’s land-agent—“and everything is settled. Poor chap! Thompson says he’s badly broken up.”
“How futile to mourn over death,” Mrs. Archinard sighed from her sofa. “Tangled as we are in the webs of temperament, and environment, and circumstance, should we not rather rejoice at the release from the great illusion?” Mrs. Archinard laid down a dreary French novel and vaguely yawned, while the Captain muttered something about talking “rot” before the children.
“Move this lamp away, Hilda,” said Mrs. Archinard. “I think I can take a nap now, if Katherine will put on the soft pedal.”
It was a warm autumn night, and the windows were open. Hilda slipped out when she had moved the lamp away.
She could not go by the country road, nor scramble through the hedge, but to climb over the wall would be an easy matter. Hilda ran over the lawn, across the meadows, and through the woods. In the uncanny darkness her white dress glimmered like the flitting wings of a moth. As she came to the wall the moon seemed to slide from behind a cloud. Hilda’s heart stood still with a sudden terror at her loneliness there in the wood at night. The boy-like vault over the wall gave her an impetus of courage, and she began to run, feeling, as she ran, that the courage was only mechanical, that the moon, the mystery of a dimly seen infinity of tree trunks, the sorrow holding her heart as if in a physical pressure, were all terrible and terrifying. But Hilda, on occasions, could show an indomitable moral courage even while her body quaked, and she ran all the half-mile from the boundary wall to Allersley Manor without stopping. There was a light in the library window; even at a distance she had seen it glowing between the trees. She ran more slowly over the lawn, and paused on the gravel path outside the library to get her breath. Yes, he was there alone. She looked into the dignified quiet of the fine old room. A tall lamp threw a strong light on the pages of the book he held, and his head was in shadow. The window was ajar, and Hilda pushed it open and went in.
At the sound Odd glanced up, and his face took on a look of half incredulous stupefaction. Hilda’s white face, tossed hair, the lamentable condition of her muslin frock, made of her indeed a startling apparition.
“My dear Hilda!” he exclaimed.