He walked her off to the little station three miles away. The bag the respectful chauffeur had wanted to carry for her up those few steps she now carried three miles herself.
‘Pity you was in such a ’urry to let that there car go,’ Mr. Pinner remarked sarcastically, as they trudged almost in silence along the lanes.
Sally gulped; delicately, because even her gulps were little gulps,—gentle, delicate little things. She didn’t know what was to become of her, she really didn’t. Go back to that dreadful house, and arrive in the middle of the party? Face real wrath, real deserved wrath, from those who even when they were being kind had terrified her? So thoroughly had Mr. Pinner’s horror at what she had done cleared her mind of Mr. Thorpe’s points of view that she felt she hadn’t a leg to stand on, and would do anything, almost, sooner than, covered with shame, go back to the anger of the Lukes. But what? What could she do except go back? Yet if she had been miserable there while she was still good, how was she going to bear it now that she had become wicked? She shuddered to think of what Mrs. Luke would be like really angry—and Mr. Luke, who had the right not to leave her alone even at night....
Sadly did Sally gulp from time to time, and every now and then emit a faint sob, as she walked in silence that morning beside the adamant Mr. Pinner to the branch-line station. She hadn’t been in the Woodles district very long, but it seemed to her as she passed along its quiet lanes that she loved every stick and stone of it. It was what she understood. It was peace. It was home. Her father went with her as far as Cambridge, so as to put her safely into the express to Liverpool Street, and his instructions were, after buying her a first class ticket—he felt that Mr. Luke would wish her to travel first class, and it gave him a gloomy pride to buy it—that she was to take a taxi from Liverpool Street, and go in it all the way to South Winch.
He then, with the ticket, gave her a pound note.
‘It can’t be more than ten miles out,’ said Mr. Pinner, who had never in his life before squandered money, let alone a pound, on a taxi, but who tried to console himself with the thought that it would have been well spent if only it got Sally safe back to where she belonged; and though he was depressed he was also proud, for it, too, gave him a kind of sombre satisfaction.
‘Been an expensive day for me, this,’ he said, gloomy, but proud.
Sally gulped.
He kept her in the waiting-room at the station till the last moment, for she was attracting the usual too well-remembered attention, and beauty in tears was even more conspicuous than beauty placid, and then he hurried her along to the front of the train, and put her in a carriage in which there was only one lady—a real lady, of course, thought Mr. Pinner, anxiously taking stock of her, or she wouldn’t be travelling first class.
‘Beg pardon, Madam,’ he said in his best behind-the-counter manner, taking his hat off. ‘You goin’ to London by any chance?’