For a moment she fancied that it was a real voice, and then she knew that it was only a voice in her head, one of those sounds we hear when we are half asleep, one of those hails from dreamland that come now as the ringing of a bell that never has rung, or the call of a person who has never spoken.
She rose up and resumed her way, striking along the glen to the open park, yet still the memory of that call pursued her.
“Phylice!”
It seemed Mr. Pinckney’s voice, it was his voice, she was sure of that now, and she amused herself by wondering why his voice had suddenly popped up in her head. She had been thinking about him more than about any one else that evening and that easily accounted for the matter. Fancy had mimicked him—yet why did Fancy use her name and clothe it in Pinckney’s voice?—and it was distinctly a call, the call of a person who wishes to draw another person’s attention.
Pinckney had never called her by her name and she felt almost irritated at the impertinence of the phantom voice in doing so.
This same irritation made her laugh when she realised it. Then the idea that Byrne might lock the hall door before she could get back drove every other thought away and she began to run, her shadow running before her over the moonlit grass.
Half way across the sward, which was divided from the grass land proper by a Ha-ha, she heard the stable clock striking eleven.