“Will you swear that nothing I could have done would have made you stay? Will you swear that, Linda?”
The younger girl in answer to this appeal, leapt from her bed and rushing up to her sister hugged her tightly in her arms.
“You darling thing!” she cried, “of course I’ll swear it. Nothing—nothing—nothing! would have made me stay. Oh, you’ll soon see how happy I can be in Rodmoor—in dear lovely Rodmoor!”
A simultaneous outburst of weeping relieved at that moment the feelings of both of them, and they kissed one another passionately through their falling tears.
In the hush that followed—whether by reason of a change in the wind or simply because their senses had grown more receptive—they both clearly heard through the window that remained closed, the husky, long-drawn beat, reiterative, incessant, menacing, of the waves of the North Sea.
During breakfast and the hours which succeeded that meal, Nance was at once surprised and delighted by the excellent spirits of both Miss Doorm and Linda. They even left her to herself before half the morning was over and went off together, apparently in complete harmony along the banks of the tidal stream.
She herself, loitering in the deserted garden, felt a curious sensation of loneliness and a wonder, not amounting to a sense of discomfort but still remotely disturbing, as to why it was that Adrian had not, as he had promised, appeared to take her out. Acting at last on a sudden impulse, she ran into the house, put on her hat and cloak, and started rapidly down the road leading to the village.
The Spring was certainly not so far advanced in Rodmoor as it was in London. Nance felt as though some alien influence were at work here, reducing to enforced sterility the natural movements of living and growing things. The trees were stunted, the marigolds in the wet ditches pallid and tarnished. The leaves of the poplars, as they shook in the gusty wind, seemed to her like hundreds and hundreds of tiny dead hands—the hands of ghostly babies beseeching whatever power called them forth to give them more life or to return them to the shadows.