“No,” said Andy. Then he added more quietly, “I don’t expect to. They will have Mr. Banks, of course, and probably other old friends.”
“Well, anyway, it’s poor fun marrying a pretty girl to somebody else,” concluded Mr. Thorpe, knocking out his pipe.
Soon after that Andy went home, and he was met in the hall by Mrs. Jebb, who informed him that Mrs. Simpson—with whom she was now on terms of armed neutrality—had been to ask him about fetching her sideboard home. It appeared that an empty removal van would be passing her house early the following morning, and the men had promised to bring the sideboard from the Vicarage, if agreeable to Mr. Deane.
Andy glanced at his watch and saw it was already past eleven.
“I will go round myself and tell her that it is all right,” he said.
“Such a shame for you to turn out again after your hard day,” said Mrs. Jebb sentimentally. “Mrs. Simpson has made more trouble about that hideous sideboard——”
But Andy was already half-way down the steps, so Mrs. Jebb resumed her candle and went up to bed, leaning awhile from her casement to watch the Hunter’s moon shining splendid over the massed tree-tops, and to dream vaguely of pale-grey satin and orange blossoms. Then she drew down her blind and perused a novel called An Autumn Rose, which had a heroine whose virgin heart had remained untouched until she was well over forty.
Andy ran along with his hands in his pockets, for the night was sharp with a touch of frost, and as he turned out of his own gate he paused for a moment to glance, like Mrs. Jebb, at the extraordinary brilliance of the moonlight.
The little village lay asleep; all the windows with drawn blinds on one side of the houses were glittering and shining in the moonlight like golden windows in some enchanted dream. The sky stretched above them, calm and wide and clear, with little waves of gold around the moon. There was scarcely a breath of wind stirring, and Andy stood in the shadow of the tree, quite still, so that he gave no sign of life to the white empty road. Any one passing would have fancied himself quite alone. Any one coming across the field-path from Gaythorpe Manor and standing on the step of the fence might have looked over the still landscape and fancied himself the only waking soul in all that quiet world.
Elizabeth, standing on that step of the fence and looking at the windows of Andy’s house, which were pale golden in the moonshine, evidently thought she was quite alone; and her face appeared stronger and more reposeful than any one who had seen her laughing in the daytime would have thought possible. The clear, bright light seemed to have drawn away the girlish softness of her features, and her tender colouring, and to have left her as she would be if the joys and passions of life had all gone from her.