The car drew up at the door, coughing and sputtering, with Bob Baxter at the wheel. Hiram sat in front beside his son, Eleanor and Betty on the seat behind. And, just as they were starting, Kate Clendennin tripped down the steps and, declining to squeeze in among the bags and bundles, leaped lightly upon the footboard at Bob's side and remained there, despite Eleanor's protest, all the way to the station.
Poor Betty! There was a moment's delay in starting the train, after the guard had given the signal and slammed the doors, and the banished secretary, looking backward through the window, caught a glimpse of the departing motor as it rounded the nasturtium bed. Kate was on the front seat next to Bob, and they both looked back, the countess laughing and waving her hand. Then the car turned a wooded corner, and that was the last picture—Kate and Bob together, close together, gliding swiftly, perhaps slowly, through those leaf-arched lanes and delicious lonesome glades of the forest. They had taken the longer way home, but there was time enough—there was not the slightest need for Kate and Bob to hurry.
CHAPTER XV
THE FOUR POTTLES
Kate and Harriet went straight to their bedrooms, Harriet to rehearse her part in the forthcoming scene with Horatio; Kate, in an angry fever, to ring for Gibson to pack her boxes without a moment's delay. She rang several times before a housemaid appeared and informed her ladyship that Gibson was nowhere to be found. There was a suppressed eagerness about the girl, as if she had something further to disclose, something unusual, but Kate did not question her, and she left the room, closing the door reluctantly behind her.
On the table near the bed lay a yellow, paper-backed book, open and face downward, in unseemly straddle, as Kate had left it the day before to keep the place. It was a collection of stories by a new French author. She picked it up and began slowly turning the pages.
Still reading, she sat down on the bed. In a little while she lifted her feet and lay back without taking her eyes from the book. Half an hour later the yellow book lay on the floor where Kate had flung it. How could anyone write such trash!
Alone in her room Harriet waited for Horatio. Since the tragedy of the afternoon before, the husband and wife had scarcely spoken, and Harriet welcomed a storm to relieve the charged atmosphere. She was ready with her opening speech and she knew what Horatio must inevitably reply, and she had prepared a crushing rejoinder. But Horatio did not come.
In the mournful exodus from the library the gentle curate had been the last, holding the door open for the others, and, after softly closing it behind him, without lifting his eyes from the ground, he had passed, unseeing and unseen, through the hall and out into the sunlit garden.
Scarcely noticing and caring not at all where he went, Horatio found himself in the lane, and now, while Harriet listened in vain for his shuffling steps on the stair, the curate was a good mile and a half away in the very heart of the Millbrook woods. He had followed at random any path that offered; if there were a choice, taking the one with the darkling look that might lead to the witches' hut or the cave of the gnomes.