The next day there was some coming and going between the Hall and the Grange, but the shadow of immediate departure lay over the Grange, and it was impossible not to take it as a departure more significant than it had hitherto appeared. Lady Eldridge might come down again for a day or two to finish her packings away for the winter. Norman said that he would come down before he went back to Cambridge. But the prospect of autumn and winter passing over the house emptied of its usual life could not be ignored, and as yet there were no signs of the complete reconciliation that Norman had announced. All the family from the Hall were at the Grange during the afternoon except Colonel Eldridge. Pamela had thought he would come with them and was disappointed because he didn't. Her mother and her aunt talked together, but, it seemed to Pamela, not in quite the same way as before.
She had one more talk with Norman alone. They went down together to Barton's Close, not with any conscious intention of visiting the scene of so much disturbance, but probably led to it by some such impulse. The wide, wood-enclosed meadow lay quiet and deserted. The soil that had been dug up for the plantings over a considerable area had been grassed over again, with the sods cut from it, but the design of the garden, as far as it had gone, was plain to be seen. It would never be made now. That thought struck them both at the same time, for they had taken a modified interest in the project, and their imaginations had played about the garden that was to have been made here. It was almost as if it had been, and was now destroyed.
"It's a pity," Norman said. "However, it doesn't really matter, if we can get rid of the bothers that came of it."
For the first time, the thought came to Pamela that her father had been unreasonable. But she put it away from her. "It wasn't this that they really quarrelled about," she said, "though it began it. Norman, do you think that it is all over? I don't feel quite so sure as I did yesterday."
Norman didn't feel quite so sure either. He had had a talk with his mother, and though she had agreed that there was nothing left now of the original grounds of the quarrel, she had not treated it as if they were back on the old terms yet. It had almost seemed to him that she didn't wish that particularly. She had been very quiet about it, but what had struck him most was that she was obviously glad that they were going away. He knew that she loved the home that she had made for herself at the Grange. She had not even seen the Suffolk house, which had not at first been talked of as if it were to provide them with more than a place for the entertainment of their shooting-parties. Some of those might very well have been for men only, and she might have preferred to come to the Grange at intervals instead of arranging for everything away from it, as she was doing now, hurriedly but completely.
But he didn't want Pam to think that they were leaving Hayslope because of the quarrel. Better debit something to his father rather than that!
"Well, all this sudden pushing off is rather like the governor, you know," he said. "He's kept himself young in that way. He gets a sudden idea into his head, and that's the great thing for the moment. I'm rather like that myself. Perhaps Uncle Edmund thinks it all rather funny; but—you'll see—when he's been up to Eylsham and shot a few birds and drunk a few glasses of good old tawny, they'll be as thick as thieves together again."
"Do you think Uncle William will ask him to shoot with him?"