Lesley, walking behind those two, paused suddenly; for Jack Raymond had lingered to hold back that trailing rose-shoot from her frills and flounces also. And the cinnamon dove, startled by the pause, fled from the rose-bush to silence and deeper shade. Its flight made her start also.
'Frightened at a dove! said Jack Raymond in a low tone, 'and you weren't a bit frightened at the plague.'
He was smiling at her, his face all soft and kind. She had never seen it like that before. But as he stepped back to Grace Arbuthnot's side, Lesley realised that she had.
The certainty that these two had been lovers once came to her then, and brought a curious sense of loneliness. The certainly that, in a way, they would be lovers always, brought her a pang before which she stood aghast. For there was no mistaking it; it was unreasonable, elemental jealousy.
She felt inclined, then and there, to turn back and leave them to do their task alone. They did not want her. What was she, Lesley Drummond, doing there in that garden whose suggestiveness seemed to stifle her? Yes! to stifle her, because she could not escape from it! She, Lesley Drummond, who---- In her mind's eye she saw a vision of herself alighting from an omnibus at the corner of Bond Street on a wet day, picking her way over the greasy blister-marks of many feet on the pavement, heedless of the infinite suggestions in the shop windows, to have tea at a ladies'-club with an intimate friend, and solve the problems of life by hard and fast individualism tempered by a sloppy socialism.
Solve! As if it were possible to solve anything in those conditions. Above all, to solve the greatest problem in the world for women, as you drank your tea on a table littered with the literature of chiffon-culture, whose every page proclaimed that woman's aim was to remain temptress, her goal a garden such as this!
They were close to the sanctuary now. The others had entered it, and Lesley paused to look contemptuously at its filagree pretence of protection ere she, too, stooped under its low arch.
'I think you have it, haven't you, Lesley?' asked Grace Arbuthnot, as she entered to find a puzzled look on all three faces. In the old woman's it was mixed with a half-indignant apprehension.
'Have what?' she asked coldly.
'The silk cord that was round the roll; I gave it to you to hold, I think. She won't speak without it; it seems it is a bracelet--an amulet.'