Soon, after gently smiling at the parlourmaid, who was an old friend of hers because she had once been in service at the Brandons, she found herself standing, a little lost and bewildered, at the corner of Green Lane and Orange Street. Lost and bewildered because one emotion after another seemed suddenly to have seized upon her and taken her captive. Lost and bewildered almost as though she had been bewitched, carried off through the shining skies by her captor and then dropped, deserted, left, in some unknown country.
Green Lane in the evening light had a fairy air. The stumpy trees on either side with the bright new green of the spring seemed to be concealing lamps within their branches. So thick a glow suffused the air that it was as though strangely coloured fruit, purple and orange and amethyst, hung glittering against the pale yellow sky, and the road running up the hill was like pale wax.
On the other side Orange Street tumbled pell-mell into the roofs of the town. The monument of the fierce Georgian citizen near which Joan was standing guarded with a benevolent devotion the little city whose lights, stealing now upon the air, sprinkled the evening sky with a jewelled haze. No sound broke the peace; no one came nor went; only the trees of the Lane moved and stirred very faintly as though assuring the girl of their friendly company.
Never before had she so passionately loved her town. It seemed to-night when she was disturbed by her new love, her new fear, her new worldly knowledge, to be eager to assure her that it was with her in all her troubles, that it understood that she must pass into new experiences, that it knew, none better indeed, how strange and terrifying that first realisation of real life could be, that it had itself suffered when new streets had been thrust upon it and old loved houses pulled down and the river choked and the hills despoiled, but that everything passes and love remains and homeliness and friends.
Joan felt more her own response to the town than the town's reassurance to her, but she was a little comforted and she felt a little safer.
She argued as she walked home through the Market Place and up the High Street and under the Arden Gate into the quiet sheltered Precincts, why should she think that Ronder mattered? After all might not he be the good fat clergyman that he appeared? It was more perhaps a kind of jealousy because of her father that she felt. She put aside her own little troubles in a sudden rush of tenderness for her family. She wanted to protect them all and make them happy. But how could she make them happy if they would tell her nothing? They still treated her as a child but she was a woman now. Her love for Johnny. She had admitted that to herself. She stopped on the path outside the decorous strait-laced houses and put her cool gloved hand up to her burning cheek.
She had known for a long time that she loved him, but she had not told herself. She must conquer that, stamp upon it. It was foolish, hopeless.... She ran up the steps of their house as though something pursued her.
She let herself in and found the hall dusky and obscure. The lamp had not yet been lit. She heard a voice:
"Who's that?"
She looked up and saw her mother, a little, slender figure, standing at the turn of the stairs holding in her hand a lighted candle.