"Well, Evelyn, he offered to marry you, he made you a great singer, and you say he'd do anything for you. I suppose I am sorry for him."
They stood looking out of the window.
"You know I'd like to stop with you; it can't be helped; but I shall come back."
"Do you think you'll come back?"
"Of course I shall come back. Where should I go if I did not come back?"
At that moment Agnes drove up in a hansom; she ran up the little garden, and carried out Evelyn's bag and placed it in the hansom.
"I must go now, father; good-bye, darling. I shan't be away more than seven or eight days."
A moment after her dear father was behind her, and she was alone in the hansom, driving towards the convent. About her were villas engarlanded with reddening creeper. On one lawn a family had assembled under the shade of a dwarf cedar, and miles of this kind of landscape lay before her. It seemed to her like painted paper, an illusion that might pass away at any moment. Her truth was no longer in the external world, but in her own soul. Her soul was making for a goal which she could not discern. She was leaving a life of wealth and fame and love for a life of poverty, chastity and obscurity. All the joy and emulation of the stage she was relinquishing for a dull, narrow, bare life at Dulwich, giving singing lessons and saying prayers at St. Joseph's. Yet there was no question which she would choose, and she marvelled at the strangeness of her choice.
The road lay through fields and past farmhouses, but the suburban street was never quite lost sight of. Its blue roofs and cheap porticos appeared unexpectedly at the end of an otherwise romantic prospect, and so on and so on, until the driver let his horse walk up Wimbledon hill. When they reached the top she craned her neck, and was in time to catch a glimpse of the windmill far away to the right. The inn was in front of her, the end of a long point of houses stretching into the common, and the hansom rolled easily on the wide, curving roads. She anticipated the choked gardens, the decaying pear trees, the gold crowns of sunflowers; and a moment after the hansom passed these things and she saw the old green door, and heard the jangling peal. The eyes of the lay sister looked through the barred loop-hole.
"How do you do, sister? I suppose you expected me?"