She almost ran along the road in her eagerness; and now her elation had increased so greatly that she felt it to be indecent—almost disgraceful—all that her father had suggested that it was. It was all very well for her to be conscious of a certain amount of satisfaction on learning that she was released from the dreadful bondage which compelled her to be the wife of a convict, but it was quite another matter to feel herself lilting that comic opera air, “I’ll kiss you and die like a ‘ero”; and, when she succeeded in banishing that ridiculous melody from buzzing in her ears, to be conscious of the rattle of the drum and the trumpet call of the cornet introducing Don César’s singing of “Let me like a soldier fall” in the opera of “Maritana.” But there they went on in her ears—the banjo-bosh of the one and the swashbuckler’s swagger of the other, accepting the beat of her hastening feet for their tempo. The more she hurried, the more rapidly the horrid tuney things went on; and she had a dreadful feeling of never being able to escape from them.
She was doomed for her wickedness to be haunted by those jingles for evermore.
Of course she had no idea that she was on the verge of hysteria; but her father would have known, if he had had any experience of the range of human emotion outside the profitable working of a large farm, that hysteria must be the sequel to that unnatural calm which his daughter had shown on learning that the man to whom she had bound herself was dead.
It was not, however, until she had reached her home and had gone very slowly upstairs to her room, that the buzzing and the lilting and the tinkling of tunes in her ears rushed together in a horrible terrifying jingle, and she cried out, flinging herself upon her bed in a paroxysm of wild tears and falsetto sobs. The reaction had come, and borne her down beneath its mad rush upon her.
When she became calm once more she had a sense of having been absurdly weak in failing to keep herself well in hand. She could not understand how it was that she had let herself behave so foolishly. If the man had been her lover she could not have been more upset by the news of his death, she thought.
But the thing had happened, however, and she felt that she might rest confident that it would never happen again. So she bathed her face and brushed her hair and set herself down to her newspapers on the seat at her open window. The sky was blue above the Downs, and the rain had left in the air a clean taste. In the meadow there were countless daffodils, and the afternoon sun was glistening upon the rain drops in their bells and on the blades of the emerald grasses of the slope. From the great brown field that was being ploughed came the rich smell of moist earth and the varying notes of the ploughman’s words to his team. When he got to the end of the furrow nearest to the farmhouse she heard his words clearly; then he turned, and his voice became indistinct as he plodded slowly on in the other direction. From the clumps of larch in the paddock came the cawing of innumerable rooks, but the song of the lark fell to her ears from the blue sky itself.
She sat for a long time with the newspapers in her lap. She had not for many months felt so restful as she did now. It seemed to her that she had been in prison for more than a year. She had heard through iron bars all the sounds that were now coming from the earth and the air and the sky, but she had not been able to enjoy them; on the contrary, they had irritated her, reminding her of the liberty which had once been hers, but which (she had felt) she was never again to know.
And now...
She sat there living in the luxury of that sense of freedom which had come to her—that sense of restfulness—of exquisite peace—the peace of God that passeth understanding. It had come to her straight from God, she felt. Although she had shown but little faith in the goodness of God, still He had not forgotten her. The words of the hymn came to her memory:—
‘’God moves in a mysterious way