Presently she heard the clock strike, and true to her tireless instinct of activity, she lifted her head, took up her pen, and went on with the correspondence she had dropped.... It was hard at first to collect her thoughts, or even to summon to her pen the conventional phrases that sufficed for most of the notes. Groping for a word, she pushed aside her writing and stared out at the sallow frozen landscape framed by the window at which she sat. The sleet had ceased, and hollows of sunless blue showed through the driving wind-clouds. A hard sky and a hard ground—frost-bound ringing earth under rigid ice-mailed trees.
As Justine looked out, shivering a little, she saw a woman's figure riding down the avenue toward the gate. The figure disappeared behind a clump of evergreens—showed again farther down, through the boughs of a skeleton beech—and revealed itself in the next open space as Bessy—Bessy in the saddle on a day of glaring frost, when no horse could keep his footing out of a walk!
Justine went to the window and strained her eyes for a confirming glimpse. Yes—it was Bessy! There was no mistaking that light flexible figure, every line swaying true to the beat of the horse's stride. But Justine remembered that Bessy had not meant to ride—had countermanded her horse because of the bad going.... Well, she was a perfect horsewoman and had no doubt chosen her surest-footed mount...probably the brown cob, Tony Lumpkin.
But when did Tony's sides shine so bright through the leafless branches? And when did he sweep his rider on with such long free play of the hind-quarters? Horse and rider shot into sight again, rounding the curve of the avenue near the gates, and in a break of sunlight Justine saw the glitter of chestnut flanks—and remembered that Impulse was the only chestnut in the stables....
She went back to her seat and continued writing. Bessy had left a formidable heap of bills and letters; and when this was demolished, Justine had her own correspondence to despatch. She had heard that morning from the matron of Saint Elizabeth's: an interesting "case" was offered her, but she must come within two days. For the first few hours she had wavered, loath to leave Lynbrook without some definite light on her friend's future; but now Amherst's letter had shed that light—or rather, had deepened the obscurity—and she had no pretext for lingering on where her uselessness had been so amply demonstrated.
She wrote to the matron accepting the engagement; and the acceptance involved the writing of other letters, the general reorganizing of that minute polity, the life of Justine Brent. She smiled a little to think how easily she could be displaced and transplanted—how slender were her material impedimenta, how few her invisible bonds! She was as light and detachable as a dead leaf on the autumn breeze—yet she was in the season of sap and flower, when there is life and song in the trees!
But she did not think long of herself, for an undefinable anxiety ran through her thoughts like a black thread. It found expression, now and then, in the long glances she threw through the window—in her rising to consult the clock and compare her watch with it—in a nervous snatch of humming as she paced the room once or twice before going back to her desk....
Why was Bessy so late? Dusk was falling already—the early end of the cold slate-hued day. But Bessy always rode late—there was always a rational answer to Justine's irrational conjectures.... It was the sight of those chestnut flanks that tormented her—she knew of Bessy's previous struggles with the mare. But the indulging of idle apprehensions was not in her nature, and when the tea-tray came, and with it Cicely, sparkling from a gusty walk, and coral-pink in her cloud of crinkled hair, Justine sprang up and cast off her cares.
It cost her a pang, again, to see the lamps lit and the curtains drawn—shutting in the warmth and brightness of the house from that wind-swept frozen twilight through which Bessy rode alone. But the icy touch of the thought slipped from Justine's mind as she bent above the tea-tray, gravely measuring Cicely's milk into a "grown-up" teacup, hearing the confidential details of the child's day, and capping them with banter and fantastic narrative.