For during those six years, nothing indeed had happened to her. The passing of the coach along that thread of road had remained a mystery. Companions and acquaintances it had brought and often; women with whom she had formed friendships, men with whom she had played strenuously and enjoyably in their games of golf.
Never had it brought her even such an experience as her elder sister's. She had never wished it should. There was no such readiness to yield in her as there was in Fanny; no undisguised eagerness for life such as might tempt the heartlessness of a man to a passing flirtation.
She treated all men the same with the frank candor of her nature, which allowed no familiarity of approach. Only with his heart could a man have reached her, never with his arms or his lips as Fanny had been.
Perhaps in those brief acquaintanceships, mainly occupied with their games, there was no time for the deeper emotions of a man's heart to be stirred. But most potent reason of all, it was that she had none of the superficial allurements of her sex. Strength was the beauty of her. It was a common attitude of hers to stand with legs apart set firmly on her feet as she talked. Yet there was no masculinity she conveyed. Only it was that so would a man find her if he sought passion in her arms and perhaps they feared the passion they might discover.
It was the transitoriness not only of hers but of all those women's touch with life that made the pattern of their destiny. No man had stayed long enough in Bridnorth to discover the tenderness and nobility of Mary Throgmorton. In that cold quality of her beauty they saw her remotely and only in the distances in which she placed herself. None had come close enough to observe that gentle smile the sculptor had curved about her lips, the deep and tender softness of her eyes. It was in outline only they beheld her, never believing that beneath that firm full curve of her breast there could beat a heart as wildly and as fearfully as a netted bird's, or that once beating so, that heart would beat for them forever.
It was just the faint knowledge of this in herself which made that passing coach a mystery to Mary. It was not as with Fanny that she thought of it as a vehicle of her Destiny, but that, as she sat there on the moors above Bridnorth, it was a link with the world she had so often read of in her books.
It came to her out of the blue over the hill, as a pigeon come with a message under its wing. Detaching that message again and again, she read it in a whisper in her heart.
"There is life away there beyond the hill," it ran. "There is life away there beyond the hill--and life is pain as well as joy and life is sorrow as well as happiness; but life is ours and we are here to live."
That message somewhere in the secrets of her heart she kept and every time the coach passed by when she was in the house the horses' hoofs on the village road beat in her thoughts--"Life is ours, we are here to live."
VII