Under the avenue of elms the wind roared so loud that Anne feared for the safety of the trees, and stepped cautiously, looking up among the swaying branches. In her hand she held the precious letter that was to set her free, the letter which was to her as the wing is to the seed.
“Once this is posted, there is no turning back,” she thought. “There will be difficulties, but they will be overcome, and when I look back on my life I shall say it began on the day when I posted this letter, and I shall remember the March gale roaring like a lion among the elms.”
A vision of an elderly lady with soft brown eyes like bees, and short grey hair, haunted her: a precise lady she would be, perhaps one who had been an actress or an opera singer in her day, and kept a casket of love-letters from all the poets of the ’eighties standing on the table beside her. Her employer would laugh gently at her enthusiasm, and would tell her wonderful anecdotes. Her name would be beautiful, and familiar: a name that is to be found in every catalogue of roses, for she was the kind of lady after whom roses are named. Anne would take the place of a daughter, and would soon inherit all her passionate fire tempered by her knowledge of the world, all her deep wisdom born of experience and of renunciation; all her cynical clear-sighted witty tenderness....
“Good morning, Miss Dunnock.” Anne’s day-dream was interrupted, and she looked down to find Rachel Sotheby standing before her, her bright eyes shining, and her cheeks flushed by the wind. Anne was pleased to see the little girl, and thinking that they must part soon, she bent down to kiss her, a thing she had not done before. As she did so, she remembered Mr. Yockney’s remark about Rachel’s boots and glanced at them. Yes, they were stiff little boots, cracked behind the toe-caps, worn out, they would let in the water.
“Mr. Yockney was quite right,” she said to herself, and entering the Post Office, was embarrassed to find a stranger standing at the counter writing a telegram.
“This must be Rachel’s brother,” she thought as she recognized the foxey nose, and the slit eyes of the photograph she had seen in the grocer’s parlour. “This must be Richard Sotheby, who has been turned into a gentleman while his sister has holes in her boots.”
As Anne asked for her postal order she avoided looking at the young man of whom she had heard so much, but while she was waiting for the pen (there was only one in the Post Office with which it was possible to write) she could not keep her eyes turned away, and when he had finished his telegram, she had to meet his eye as he handed her the pen. The action was polite, but though their eyes met for an instant, she could see that it was mechanical, she had not engaged his attention, he was thinking of his telegram, and next moment she heard him spelling it over to Mrs. Day, the post-mistress, and explaining that it was in French.
“The Church Times....” wrote Anne.
“G...R...A...N...D...I...S...O...N,” spelt the young man.
“Barclays Bank and Co.,” wrote Anne, keeping her ears open but failing to follow the address.