The maple by the schoolhouse turned early that year. When Esther, in her pilgrimage, came to say good-bye it welcomed her with all the glory of autumn. Against its greener brothers it stood out, naming, defiant. Beside it, the red pump seemed no longer red. Red and yellow, its falling leaves tossed themselves into the girl's lap as she sat upon the porch steps. It is almost certain that, as Esther gathered them, she compared her sad heart to a leaf which had fluttered from the tree of happy life. There seemed no outlook for her. She could not see through winter into spring.
The school children with their new teacher (whom Esther could not help but feel was sadly incompetent) had all gone home and it was very quiet on the porch steps. She closed her eyes and dreamed and clearly through her dream she heard, as she had heard that first morning in early summer, a determinedly cheerful, yet husky, voice singing. Some one was coming down the hill.
"From Wimbleton to Wombleton is fifteen miles;
From Wombleton to Wimbleton is fifteen miles;
From Wimbleton to Wombleton, from Wombleton to Wimbleton,
From Wimbleton to Wombleton,—"
The song trailed off into silence as it had done before. The girl's closed eyes smarted with tears—"Oh, it is a very long way!" she murmured, and burying her face in fallen leaves she felt that at last she knew the meaning of despair.
But though his voice had echoed through Esther's dream, Callandar was not on the long hill nor anywhere near it. Unlike Esther, he paid no farewells during these last days. He avoided the hill particularly and drove past the schoolhouse seldom and always at top speed. If the sight of the turning maples moved him at all it was not because he compared his lost happiness to a fallen leaf. Callandar was long past such gentle sadnesses as these. Every day he filled as full of work as possible. He walked far and hard in hope of tiring himself into dreamless sleep at night. And every day his face grew older, greyer, more sternly set.
At the very last, and as if inspired by some special imp of the perverse, Mary declared that she must have a church wedding. Opposition was useless. With all the distorted force of her drug-ridden brain, she desired this one thing. She wept, she coaxed, she raved. Every woman, she stormed, had a right to a proper wedding. She had always been cheated, she had been a pawn shoved about at the bidding of others, her own wishes never consulted. Was there any reason, any reason at all, why she should not be properly married in the church?
He ventured quietly to remind her that there were peculiar circumstances in the case. But she burst out at that. He was ashamed of her. Ashamed of his own wife. If there were peculiar circumstances whose fault were they? Not hers, surely? Would she be where she was now if he had not neglected her all those years? Anyway, peculiar circumstances or not, she would be married decently or she would not be married at all.
With set lips, the doctor gave in. Opposition maddened her, and, after all, one farce more or less could not matter much.
"Very well," he said, "make your own arrangements."
Immediately, Mary became amiable. She was quite polite to Miss Philps, almost pleasant to Esther. Into the preparations for the wedding she entered with some of her old spasmodic energy. The occasion, she determined, should be a talked of one in Coombe. She made plans, a fresh one every day, and talked of them continually.