Breakfast with the Ingestres was a movable and unsociable feast. The various members of the family came down when it suited them, the only punishment being the inevitable one of cold eggs and bitter tea, and conversation was restricted to the barest necessities. The Rev. John was usually engrossed in parochial letters, Mrs. Ingestre was never present at all, and Miles only at such a time when it pleased him. Thus Nora, choosing on the morning following the momentous interview to be an early riser, found little difficulty in making her escape. The Rev. John was more absorbed than usual in his post, since it contained not only letters dealing with his cure of souls, but also some disagreeable business facts which he swallowed with his tea in melancholy gulps.
Nora kissed him lightly on the high forehead as she ran toward the open French window. Rather to her surprise, the customary caress seemed to arouse her father from his reflections. He looked up and blinked, like a man who is trying to remember some important matter.
"My dear," he said, before Nora had reached the lawn, "is it really true that you want to go abroad? Your mother was talking to me about it last night."
"We were thinking about it," Nora admitted, fidgeting nervously with the blind-cord. "Mother said she thought it would be good for me."
"But, my dear child, what shall we do without you?" her father complained.
Nora made an almost imperceptible movement of impatience. She knew of what her father was thinking, and it did not move her to any great degree of sympathy.
"You will manage all right," she said. "Mr. Clerk will help you with your letters." And then, to cut the conversation short, she went out into the garden and along the gravel pathway towards the road.
The sun shone gloriously. All the charm of an English summer morning lay in the air, and Nora drew in great breaths with a joyous, unconscious triumph in her own fresh youth and health. The garden was the one place in the village which she really loved. The ugly, modern red-brick church, the straggling "square," with its peppermint bull's-eye monument to some past "glorious victory," in which the inhabitants of Delford were dimly supposed to have had their honourable share, the stuffy cottages, interspersed here and there by an ivy-overgrown residence of some big-wig of the neighbourhood—these features were unaccountably connected in Nora's mind with her father's sermons, the drone of the organ, and the dull piety of Sundays. But the garden was all her mother's. Nora believed that within its peaceful limits the forgotten and despised fairies of ancient lore took refuge from the matter-of-fact bigots who formed Delford's most respectable community. She had even christened a certain rose-corner the "Fairy Castle," and it amused her riotous young fancy to imagine an indignant and horrified Queen Mab scampering across the lawn in disorganised flight, before the approach of the enemy in the form of Mrs. Clerk, the curate's wife, or Mrs. Chester of the Manor. The garden was, as it were, Mrs. Ingestre's self-created Eden in the drab-coloured land of the Philistines, and even the Rev. John was an intruder and disturber of its poetic peace. Nora felt all this, and in a dim, unformed way understood why her mother's roses were different to the roses in other and richer gardens, why the very atmosphere had its own peculiar perfume, the silence its own peculiar mystery. She felt that her mother had translated herself into the flowers, and that the depths of her quiet, unfathomable heart were revealed in their beauty and sweetness. She felt that if she could have read their language, the very daisies on the lawn would have lifted the veil which hung between her and the woman who seemed to her the most perfect on earth. For, in spite of their close and tender relationship, Mrs. Ingestre's inner life was for her daughter a sort of Holy of Holies, into which no human being had ever ventured.
Thus, once beyond the reach of her father's voice, Nora lingered willingly between the rose beds, making mental comments on the progress of the various favourites and for the moment forgetting the matter which was weighing heavily on her mind. At the gate opening out on to the road, however, she pulled herself sharply together, with a sudden gravity on her young face. Either the church steeple visible above the trees, or the sight of an inquisitive face peering through the blinds of the house opposite, reminded her that the frontier of Eden was reached, and that the dull atmosphere of respectability was about to encompass her. She went quickly through the village. Most of the villagers touched their caps as she passed, and Mrs. Clerk, early bird of charity that she was, attempted to waylay her, to discuss the desirability of procuring parish relief for bedridden old Jones, and, incidentally, of course, to discover how far the pleasantly lugubrious reports respecting the Ingestres' disabled fortunes were founded on fact. Nora, however, avoided her enemy with the assistance of an absent-minded smile and increased speed, and managed to reach her destination without further interruption.
Her destination was a stile which led out on to a narrow pathway over the fields. She was fond of the spot, partly because if you turned your back to the east it was quite possible to forget that such things as Delford or the church or the peppermint bull's-eye monument existed, partly because westwards the limitless stretch of undulating fields seemed to suggest freedom and the great world beyond, of which Nora thought so much. On this particular morning it was not the view which attracted her, as her rather unusual conduct testified. She arranged her ruffled brown hair, stooped, and tightened a shoelace, undid the second shoelace and retied it with methodical precision. Then some one said "Good morning, Nora," and she sprang upright with her cheeks red with surprise or exertion, or anything else the beholder chose to suppose.