“To be sure, my dear. You haven’t been through all this for nothing, you know,” said Mrs. Mulholland, shaking her head wisely. “Now I’m going into the garden to say my office, and you know that I shall always give you and dear little Sister Frances a special intention. I’ve put you in together.”
She kissed Rosamund warmly, then kilted her skirts in her accustomed fashion and took her old black manuals out into the spring sunshine and began her slow, steady pounding walk round and round the small enclosure.
The years would see little change for Mrs. Mulholland, until that last one which she contemplated with such matter-of-fact anticipation.
Something in that certainty sent Rosamund away with a strange lessening of the tension at her heart.
She went back to the Wye Valley, and after a little while she went across to the cottage.
Afterwards, Rosamund thought that it was on that day that she received the first hint of the solution that she had been seeking. But at the time she was conscious only of a blurred, aching pain, that yet held the strange solemnity of final peace.
The spring rain was driving against the window-panes and the outlines of the hills were dimmed.
Rosamund wept wildly and uncontrollably, but after that afternoon she bade farewell to the stormy tears of her girlhood, and they came to her no more.
There is a certain sort of weeping that, when it has once been wrung from a woman’s eyes, precludes the easy relief of trivial tears for almost all the rest of her life.
Rosamund went over the small house and found it strangely unchanged. Through it all, the sense of coming home was strong upon her.