With rapid and trembling fingers she assumed the last details of her travelling costume, smoothed her golden hair, gave a final glance at herself in the mirror, and saw how pale and unslept she looked after her past night's vigil, tied her veil tightly across her face, fitted on her gloves with accuracy, took her travelling bag, and with a prayer on her lips prepared to go out into the world—alone!
The clustering roses and clematis were about the windows of the square turret-room, notwithstanding its great height from the ground; the birds were twittering among them, and diamond dewdrops gemmed every leaf.
Light and shadowy clouds of mist, exhaled upwards by the early morning sun, hung about the summit of Moelmannoch and other hills, and in the sunshine the insect world was all astir: the bees were already abroad, and the blackbirds were hopping about the gravelled terraces. To Dulcie it seemed that they at least were at home.
She leaned for a moment out of the window and drank—for the last time—a deep draught of the pure air that came from the lovely Scottish landscape over which her eyes wandered, as it stretched away down the fertile and peaceful Howe of the Mearns, the corn deepening into gold, the picturesque houses, luxuriant orchards and gardens; and she bade to each and all farewell, with little regret, perhaps, for with all their beauty they were too intimately associated with the idea of Lady Fettercairn and many a humiliation.
Opening her room-door she stole swiftly down the great carpeted staircase, passed through the drawing-rooms into the conservatory, the door of which she knew she could unlock more easily than that of the great door which opened to the porte cochère. There was no one yet astir in all that numerous household, so, hurrying across the dewy lawn, she turned her face resolutely towards the station, where she knew she would reach the early Aberdeen train for the South.
The country highway was deserted; she met no one but a gamekeeper returning from a night's watch, perhaps, with his gun under his arm. She thought he looked at her curiously as she passed him, sorely weighted by her travelling bag, but he did not address her; and so without other adventures she reached the little wayside station of Craigengowan just as the gates were being unclosed, and, quickly securing her ticket, retired to the seclusion of the waiting-room.
Her heart had but one aching thought—the parting with Finella.
In her pride and indignation we must admit that Dulcie, ever a creature of impulse, was not acting judiciously. She had not stopped to ask a letter of recommendation—'a character,' she mentally and bitterly phrased it—from Lady Fettercairn; neither had she risked the opposition and kind advice of Finella, but had thus left her present life of irritation and humiliation to rush into a new and unknown world, that now, even when she had barely crossed the rubicon, was beginning, as she sat in the lonely and empty wayside station, to chill and dismay her.
'In the future that is before me, whom am I to trust in again? How am I to fight the world's battle alone?' she was beginning to think, even while the clanking train for the South came sweeping across the echoing Howe.
Ay, she so pure, so artless, so unsuspecting of evil in others!