“Two mornings ago, up above the house in that big clearing in the woods,” he answered. “I know nothing more about it. It frightened me rather, and then it stopped.”
“What did it play?” asked Philip.
“A world-without-end tune,” he said. “The catechising is now over. I shall go to bed, I think. I must leave to-morrow, Philip.”
“I hoped you would stop a day or two longer. Must you really go?”
“I must, I find.”
“Appointment with Pan in the New Forest,” remarked Evelyn, dodging the cushion that was thrown at him.
Philip had to spend the inside of the next day in London, and left with Tom Merivale by an early train, leaving Evelyn alone with his mother, Lady Ellington, and Madge. It came about very naturally that Lady Ellington gravitated to Mrs. Home, and Evelyn, finishing his background sketch in front of a great clump of purple clematis, found Madge on the terrace when he went out, with an unopened book on her lap.
The book had lain there, indeed, in the same state for half an hour before he came, for Madge had been very fully occupied with her own thoughts. She had had a talk to her mother the night before, which this morning seemed to her to be more revealing of herself than even her own confession to Philip in their stroll on the terrace had been. She had told her just what she had told him, namely, that she gave him very willingly all that she knew of herself, liking, esteem, respect, adding out of Philip’s mouth that this more than contented him. But then Lady Ellington, for the first time perhaps for many years, had made a strategical error, allowing her emotion, not her reason, to dictate to her, and had said—
“Ah, Madge, how clever of you.”
She had seen her mistake a moment afterwards, and just a moment too late, for Madge had asked the very simple question “Why?” And the unsatisfactory nature of her mother’s reply had given her food for thought.