Coming back for the midday meal she would say to Hannah across the table--
"How you can stick in the house all day, one week after another, beats me. It was perfectly lovely this morning up there on the moors. We all make life so automatic here that one might as well put a penny in the slot and have finished with it. It's only a pennyworth we get."
From this they received the impression she had also given to herself, that she had been drinking in the beauties of the countryside. If she had, it was but a sip of wine at the altar where she had been kneeling in inmost meditation.
This morning, feeling the sun too hot for energy, she had found for herself a sheltered bed in the heather where, through a gap in the jungle it became as she lay in the midst of it, she could see the farm in its hollow, the sea of cerulean beyond and, nearer in the foreground, a belt of pine trees standing up amongst their surrounding gorse and bracken.
It was there upon a path leading through the bracken to a gate in one of the farmer's hedges, she caught her first glimpse of Mary and Liddiard. The mere fact of her not being on the golf links as she had said drove the suspicion hot, like a branding iron, on Jane's thoughts.
She watched them pass by below the hill on which she had found her bed and her eyes followed them like a bird's, alert and keen. When they stopped at the gate and Liddiard seated himself on it with his feet resting on the bar beneath while Mary stood below him, Jane made for herself a window in that secreting wall of heather and lay there, watching them, with all her blood fermenting to a biting acid that tasted in her mouth and smarted in her eyes, becoming even, as it were, a self-righteous irritation beneath her skin.
To her it was obvious enough. Their Mary who read so many books, who seemed to care so little what destiny the fateful coach to Bridnorth brought her, was sport of Fate and surely now. Their Mary was in love.
Jane angered at the realization of it to think what a fool her sister was. It would be talked about the whole village over, especially then, during the holidays when the summer visitors were there. One visitor there was in particular who came every year and spent most of her mornings after bathing drying her hair on the beach and talking scandal till hunger and the mid-day meal called her homewards.
What a fool she was! This story of herself and a married man would linger long whiles in Bridnorth. They had not much to talk of. They preserved their gossipings with assiduous care. Each year it would be whispered about her and men would keep her at a greater distance than ever.
They talked there together for an hour and more. For an hour and more, Jane lay and watched them. What were they talking of? Sometimes by the way he spoke, leaning down and riveting each word upon Mary's attention, it seemed as though their conversation were of the most serious nature.