The long sunny days of June dragged by. Suppose after all she were to slip away to Huntley. It would be a spree, it would be an excitement. Did he matter so much after all?...
Peter sent a postcard and said he thought he would go on “with some people into Italy.”
She had known—all along—that that was coming.
She went out the night after that postcard came into the garden alone. It was a still and sultry evening, and she stifled even in the open air. She wanted to go up into the arbour and to sit there and think. She could not understand the quiver of anger that ran through her being like the shiver of the current on the surface of a stream. All the trees and bushes about her were dark and shapeless lumps of blackness and as she went up the path she trod on two snails.
“Damn them!” she said at the second scrunch. “Phew! What a night. Full of things that crawl about in the darkness. Full of beastly things....”
A little owl mewed and mocked wickedly among the trees.
There was no view out of the black arbour, only the sense of a darkened world. A thin ineffectual moon crescent was sinking westward, and here and there were spiritless stars. A strange, huge shape of clouds, a hooded figure of the profoundest blue, brooded in a sky of luminous pale yellow over the land to the south and east, and along the under fringe of its skirts ever and again there ran a flicker of summer lightning. “And I am to live here! I am to live here while life runs by me,” she said.
She would go to Huntley. No brother and sister business though! She would go to Huntley and end all this torment.
But she couldn’t!...
“Why have I no will?” she cried harshly.