"Yes." Agatha looked at her as if wondering. There had been some meaning in her tone that the girl felt but did not understand.
"Yes. Don't you see? There is a chance for you now," said Mrs. Greatorex playfully, but with deadly meaning. The girl, after a swift glance at her, turned away. She felt cold and sick. Was this woman human, to pretend—to jest so—on the very threshold of death? And was it all jesting? She drew a long breath, as if suffocating.
"How can you talk like that?" she said.
CHAPTER XV
"Nothing is more pleasant to the eye," said Lord Bacon, "than green grass nicely shorn." And truly his quaint Lordship would have been pleased had he been able to look upon Mrs. Poynter's grass to-day. It was shorn and shaven as close as the priest of old who was so unkind as to marry the pretty maid forlorn to that dreadfully tattered old man we have all known in our story books. For summer was gone to sleep, and lay prone upon the earth covered with her dead rose-leaves—only to wake again hereafter.
And now Autumn reigned. The dahlias in the long borders were shining like coloured stars, and the asters and sunflowers still upheld their heads. In the smaller beds the good begonias, who never crave for rest until dread frost compels them, shed great splendour where they lay. But they are frail things, and drop from their stems in a night when harsh winds assail them.
June, July, August, all have gone. And with them every thought of the poor woman who had been done to death so strangely, only three months ago! One never talked of Mrs. Darkham now, though every one said a good deal about, Dr. Darkham, who had come back three weeks ago from that sad trip he had taken to shake off his grief.
His grief appeared excellently well shaken off, they all said. He seemed quite to ignore it, indeed, when he returned, looking pale and thin certainly, but more interested in social surroundings. He was more full of life than he had ever been before.
Mr. Sparks, a young man staying with the Poynters, who during the last year had contracted an unfortunate passion for photographing his friends, was now standing out on the lawn, with his instrument of torture before him, and his head buried in a dirty velveteen cloth. He "meant well," as they say, but he never did it. He was abnormally tall and thin, and his hair fell over his forehead; the atrocities that he had committed no doubt preyed upon his conscience. To add to his other misfortunes, he was a friend of Dicky Browne, who to-day was taking great joy out of him.
"We'll be taken in a group," decided Mr. Browne, after a long discussion; "we can be taken separately afterwards, if we have the courage."