Susannah Sheepmarsh, tobacconist’s assistant, lodging-house keeper’s daughter, and Sidney Selborne, younger son of a house whose pride was that it had been proud enough to refuse a peerage.
John Selborne thought long and deeply.
“I suppose I must sacrifice myself,” he said. “Little adventuress! ‘How easy to prove to him,’ I said, ‘that an eagle’s the game her pride prefers, though she stoops to a wren instead.’ The boy’ll hate me for a bit, but he’ll thank me later. Yalding? That’s somewhere on the Medway. Fishing? Boating? Convalescence is good enough. Fiction aid us! What would the villain in a book do to come between fond lovers? He would take the lodgings: at least he would try. And one may as well do something.”
So he wrote to Mrs Sheepmarsh—she had rooms to let, he heard. Terms? And Mrs Sheepmarsh wrote back; at least her reply was typewritten, which was a bit of a shock. She had rooms. They were disengaged. And the terms were thus and such.
Behold John Selwyn Selborne then, his baggage neatly labelled with his first and second names, set down on the little platform of Yalding Station. Behold him, waggonette-borne, crossing the old stone bridge and the golden glory of the Leas, flushed with sunset.
Mrs Sheepmarsh’s house was long and low and white. It had a classic porch, and at one end a French window opened through cascades of jasmine to a long lawn. There were many trees. A middle-aged lady in decent black, with a white cap, and white lace about her neck, greeted him with formal courtesy. “This way,” she said, and moved for him to follow her through a green gate and down a shrubbery that led without disguise or pretence straight away from the house. It led also to a little white building embowered in trees. “Here,” said the lady. She opened the door. “I’ll tell the man to bring your luggage. Good evening——”
And she left him planted there. He had to bend his head to pass under the low door, and he found himself in a tiny kitchen. Beyond were a sitting-room and two bedchambers. All fitted sparsely, but with old furniture, softly-faded curtains, quiet and pleasant to look upon. There were roses in a jug of Grès de Flandre on the gate-table in the sitting-room.
“What a singular little place!” he said. “So these are the lodgings. I feel like a dog in a kennel. I suppose they will throw me a bone by-and-by—or, at any rate, ask me what kind of bones I prefer.”
He unpacked his clothes and laid his belongings in the drawers and cupboards; it was oddly charming that each shelf or drawer should have its own little muslin bag of grey lavender. Then he took up a book and began to read. The sunset had died away, the daylight seemed to be glowing out of the low window like a tide, leaving bare breadths of darkness behind. He lighted candles. He was growing hungry—it was past eight o’clock.
“I believe the old lady has forgotten my existence,” he said, and therewith opened his cottage door and went out into the lighter twilight of the garden. The shrubbery walks were winding. He took the wrong turning, and found himself entering on the narrow lawn. From the French window among the jasmine came lamplight—and voices.