Trix made hastily for the door. The next moment she was through it, to find herself face to face with a man and a wheelbarrow. Trix came to a standstill, a standstill at once sudden and unpremeditated. The man dropped the wheelbarrow. They stared blankly at each other. And Trix was far too flustered to realize that his stare was infinitely more amazed than her own.
“You can’t come through this way,” said the man, decisive though bewildered. His orders regarding the non-entrance of strangers had been of the emphatic kind.
Trix’s brain worked rapidly. The route before her must lead to safety, and nothing, no power on earth, would take her back through the field atop the wood. She was genuinely, quite genuinely too frightened. This is by way of excuse, since here a regrettable fact must be recorded. Trix gave vent to a sound closely resembling a sneeze. It was followed by one brief sentence.
“There’s someone at the gate,” was what the man heard.
Again amazement was written on his face. He turned towards the gate. Trix fled past him.
“I couldn’t go back,” she insisted to herself, as she vanished round the corner of a big green-house. “And I did say ‘isn’t there’ even if it was mixed up with a sneeze. And wherever have I seen that man’s face before?”
She whisked round another corner of the green-house, attempting no answer to her query at the moment, ran down a long cinder path bordered by cabbages and gooseberry bushes, and bolted through another door in another wall. And here Trix found herself in an orchard, at the bottom of which was a yew hedge wherein she espied a wicket gate. She made rapid way towards it. And now she saw a big grey house facing her. There was no mistaking it. Childhood’s memories rushed upon her. It was Chorley Old Hall.
Trix came through the wicket gate, and out upon a lawn, in the middle of which was a great marble basin full of crystal water, from which rose a little silver fountain. Before her was the big grey house, melancholy, deserted-looking. The blinds were drawn down in most of the windows. It had the appearance of a house in which death was present.
And then a spirit of curiosity fell upon her, a sudden strong desire to see within the house, to go once more into the rooms where she had stood in the old days, a small and somewhat frightened child.
There was not a soul in sight. Probably the man with the wheelbarrow had not thought it worth while to pursue her. The garden appeared as deserted as the house. Trix tip-toed cautiously towards it. She looked like a kitten or a canary approaching a dead elephant.