The bedroom window was open, but the curtains were drawn.
He whistled again, and watched for a movement behind them.
Nothing stirred.
He went indoors, scribbled a note saying he would be back to lunch, left it on the table of the sitting-room, seized a stick, and started down the path and up the road with great energetic strides in the direction of Blackgang. It was eleven o’clock, and he would walk as hard as he knew how for two hours. That ought to do him good; that ought to take the slackness out of him. Oh, jolly, jolly to be walking again, really walking....
But hardly had he got a few yards from the cottage when he heard Catherine calling. He heard her little voice through all the scrunchings of his footsteps on the road and the rustlings of spring in the trees, as he would hear it, he was sure, if she should call him from the sleep of death.
He stopped, and went back slowly.
She was at the bedroom window, holding the curtains a tiny strip apart, for she shrank from showing herself to him at the window in the morning light before she had had time to do what she could for her silly face, which was being so tiresome these days and looking so persistently haggard.
‘Chris—Chris—where are you going?’ she called.
‘I left you a note, darling.’
‘A note? Why?’