“Lucilla always said so. There is the cottage, Owen. Will you wait outside, or come in?”
“I should like to come in with you.”
Life was inartistic, Quentillian reflected whimsically, while Flora delivered her father’s message to a middle-aged woman in an apron.
To accord with all literary conventions, there should have been a sick child in the cottage, and Flora’s tender soothing of its fretfulness should have proved a revelation of the unfulfilled maternal instinct within her.
But there was no sick child to provide a clou for Quentillian’s observations in psychology, and he was by no means assured of Flora’s powers of soothing. Rather would she urge the silence of resignation.
He was convinced that never in her life had Flora Morchard been the centre of a pretty picture. That her personality seldom dominated any scene was not, he felt, from any conscious effacement, but from an innate and instinctive withdrawal of her forces to some unseen objective, to her infinitely worth while. He reflected with dismay on his own undertaking to make enquiries concerning the death of David Morchard. But he did not think that Flora, whatever the result of the enquiries, would be dismayed. Dismay implied mental disarray, a quality of taken-abackness. Flora, as she would herself have told him, was strong in a strength not her own.
They walked back together almost in silence.
“Your little expedition did Flora good,” the Canon told Quentillian that evening. “I am grateful to you, dear fellow, very grateful. Let us see something of you still, from Stear. It means a great deal to us both. There must not be ‘good-bye’ between us, save for the beautiful old meaning of the word, ‘God by you.’ God by you always, dear Owen.”
Quentillian went to London, made no discoveries at all, and wrote to Flora.
She replied, thanking him, in the briefest of notes. A week later he received another letter from her.