By taking the path through the wood she had cut off a wide curve of the main road. She was nearly home. Already the few remaining lights of the village bade her welcome back to dullness.
“Five years!” she said to herself, “and I may live in it for fifty more.”
Kitty Carstairs scarcely remembered her mother. She had been brought—or allowed to bring herself up—by her father, a Glasgow journalist of brilliant parts and erratic methods, a wretched manager of his worldly affairs, a delightful guest, an entertaining host, and altogether a very lovable fellow. Kitty adored him, and ignored his weaknesses and eccentricities. When he died after a long illness, she wished she might follow him quickly. He left a little money, and just enough debts to eat it up, five MSS. of novels, two collections of travel sketches, and a play—all in a more or less unfinished state—and a letter to Kitty’s only relatives, the brother and sister of his dead wife.
Kitty never saw the contents of that letter; all she knew was that it seemed to procure her a home with John Corrie and his sister in the village of Dunford.
For many years John Corrie had been postmaster as well as proprietor of a flourishing general store, the only shop of importance in the place. A canny man and a far-sighted was John Corrie, grasping but not exactly mean. If the villagers did not love him, they respected his success. He had “got on” marvellously. Apart from the store he owned a mill, bought for an old song from the trustee of a bankrupt, and a coal yard taken over from an unlucky merchant and mortgagee. Also he had invested savings in land and houses. For some years, also, he had indulged in more speculative transactions. He was a tall, gaunt man with small, pale blue eyes, a long melancholy nose, a tight mouth, and high prominent cheek-bones over scanty grizzling whiskers, which ran into a short untidy beard. His head was quite bald. He was an abstainer, and a regular attender at public worship, though not an office-bearer of the church.
His sister Rachel assisted him capably in the store. She may have been a good-looking maiden; now she was a scraggy, drear-visaged creature with a curiously suspicious manner and a craze for doing everything precisely as her mother had done it. She seemed to object to youth discovering or making use of a new method. She was mean in some ways, but, perhaps for lack of courage, not so grasping as her brother. To him she was devoted.
Kitty attended to the post-office which served a district sparsely populated, but of considerable extent. She had never received a penny for this. On the other hand her relations did not grudge her in board, lodging and clothing; and twice a year they gave her a pound to spend as she liked. She divided the money on “pretty things” and books. Books, by the way, had initiated the friendship between her and Colin Hayward. He had lent her many, but only one at a time, for the thing had to be done secretly; but he, at least, preferred “one at a time,” since it meant frequent meetings during his holidays.
As Kitty neared the cottage, which was ancient looking without but fairly modern within, and which was connected with the store and post-office, she was suddenly informed by her eyes that the room on the right of the door was illuminated. Unless on a Sunday night, it was a rare thing to see a light in the parlour. The Corries received few visitors, with the exception of Alec Symington, the owner of White Farm, and a familiar guest like him was expected to feel at home in the kitchen.
The girl was uncertain what to do. She rejected the temptation to steal upstairs to bed; she was not going to let them think she was afraid of them at this time of day! Well, there was nothing for it but to go into the kitchen and wait. Noiselessly she entered and seated herself in a wicker chair.
A moment later the silence in the opposite room was broken, and by her aunt’s voice raised to an unusual pitch.