CHAPTER XXVI
“ALL CHANGE HERE”
Cicely’s answering wire—for a wonder correctly worded—arrived this morning at breakfast as I came down.
I’ve shown it to the Waters: explained that I must be off at once. Only Theo protested angrily, “Your chum ill? How careless of her just when we were such a jolly party, and going to Red Wharf Bay with the Charriers to-morrow, and all!” The others accepted it with scarcely a word. They didn’t even show that they found it odd that Miss Harradine, who lives in Battersea, should hand her telegram in at Euston Station—though I wondered over that myself. Not even Mrs. Waters said a word to press me to wait and send a nurse instead; she didn’t ask when I thought I might come back. If she looked questions I didn’t see them; I was steadfastly keeping my eyes for breakfast-cups, and clocks, and time-tables, and anything but the faces of these people I’m going to leave—for good. All the morning I’ve spent in my bedroom, packing-up.
Twice, while I was busily emptying drawers and laying out my things in folded heaps on the bed, I heard outside my window a whistle like a blackbird’s note; but this time I wasn’t taken in for a moment. I knew it wasn’t a blackbird. I took no notice of him.
I went on packing, laying my string-soled bathing shoes at the bottom of my trunk. A long time before I shall need those again! I let him whistle.
He tried something else.
Twice there was a sharp tap on the pane, just as when that thrush was cracking a snail. But I knew that this time it really was a pebble thrown up to catch my attention: thrown, not from the trimly-gravelled sweep in front of a big house, but from the cottage garden planted with sandy white pinks and lad’s-love—thrown to bring me down. I wasn’t to be either whistled or tapped to his side.
I rolled my sun-bonnet—there was a little rip where it had caught on a gorse prickle—into a tight pink bundle and rammed it down beside my shoes.
I wasn’t going down.