There was no answer. He expected none. But on Thursday evening he was there. From where he stood behind the boxwood he could see all that part of the grounds in which she walked. She appeared at the usual time, attended by a powerful looking woman who disliked exercise and made heavy work of it. Their relations were apparently hostile. They never spoke. The girl was supercilious; the woman grim. After a while the woman sat on an iron bench. The girl walked to and fro. Twice she came within a stone’s throw of the boxwood and turned back. Once she stood for several minutes, looking slowly up and down the boundary line of hedge and stone, and at the sky, and all around, with a wilful blind spot in her eye. She did not for an instant look seeingly at the spot her mind was focussed on. Yet John, who watched her, knew she sensed his presence there. That was all that happened. She presently went in without notice to the woman, who saw her going toward the house and followed.
John sent another note. A second time he waited. This time she changed her walk in oblique relation to the boxwood and finished it without the slightest glance or impulse in that direction.
There was a third time. And that was different. On the first turn she came closer to the boxwood than ever before, closer still on the second turn, and then, when the gaoler woman had become inert on the bench, she came within speaking distance and sat on the grass.
“We are here,” said John.
“Who are we?” she asked.
This was parley.
“I am their deputy,” he said. “Constructively they are here. Naturally, all of us couldn’t come at one time and—” He stopped. She wasn’t the kind of girl he was expecting. She embarrassed his style.
“And hide in the hedge,” she said, finishing his sentence. “Why not? It wouldn’t be any less rude if twenty did it.”
“That isn’t fair,” he said. “We don’t mean to be rude. We only want to get you out.”
“You think I couldn’t get out by myself if I wanted to?”