“When does your leave end?” Margaret asked.
“Monday.”
“You must go back to your ship, then?”
“Yes, by noon.”
She turned to John. “And you, too?”
Something in her intonation caught his attention, and he looked swiftly at her.
“Yes,” he said. “You must send us news of London as our share in your home-coming.... I want to hear of your great-grandmother’s welcome.”
“Her great-grandmother?” Mrs. Fane-Herbert put in.
“The portrait, mother—the one over the stairs.” Then to John: “She’ll give me comments with her welcome, a lecture for her runaway.”
There was a hint of bitterness in that; but John’s remembering that conversation on the first evening she had known him stung her with the sting—half-pleasant, half-painful—of childhood days recalled in dark moments. For now she was easily stung to sorrow or to a kind of fierce joy. She had wanted desperately to talk, to tell someone how free she was—Ordith being gone. Untold, her freedom seemed incomplete. But neither her father nor her mother had spoken. They had learnt the facts, accepted them; she had attempted no explanation; not one word had been said. This silence had a hardening quality. Her experience, the vivid remembrance of which might have flowed easily away, was somehow frozen in her mind, like a sin unconfessed. There was no one to whom she could go. Warmth of heart, comradeship, the simplest affection she starved for. But this being left alone, this frigidness of spirit, this intolerable independence....