“I hope,” Edmund had said, “that you will always keep a warm place in your heart for her.” I found I had, and that it would hurt me as much as him when she was sold.
My blunder about “scrap price” had been prophetic.
When I thought of the little familiar cabin of the Astarte, all the pomp of the saloons and state-rooms on the steamer seemed to me but vanity and vulgarity.
I was back in my vicarage. In my absence the tremulous passion of spring had passed into the suave splendour of early June. I grudged having missed the pageant of April and May, for at my age one begins to count the number of springs one can still hope to see. I had rather dreaded my arrival and the necessity of explaining things, but it was made much easier for me than I had dared to hope.
Travellers are often disappointed by the lack of interest in their experiences which they find among those they left at home. The fact that they have temporarily enlarged the orbit of their little swirl on this planet gives them a new sense of their own importance. They are apt to look upon events that have happened at home as trivial, merely because they happened at home and not in some other latitude. Until they settle down again, they think of the people around them as absurdly interested in very minor matters. They forget that in them too distance had once annihilated interest, and will do so again.
As always happens on such occasions, Bates and Mrs. Rattray were much more eager to impart information than to receive it, and for once the returned adventurer was sincerely thankful for this perfectly natural attitude of mind.
Mrs. Rattray had deemed the occasion of sufficient importance to emerge from her own precincts and welcome me in the hall.
“We were glad to get your wire, sir,” she said as Bates took my coat and brought my scanty luggage in.
“I was afraid you would be very uneasy,” I said, feeling like a guilty schoolboy. “But I simply hadn’t a chance to send word, and I could not resist going on.”