“Yes, yes, I’ll go and see—I’ll make all arrangements.”
Mrs. Darrell hurried out of the room, leaving Eleanor to contemplate the sudden change in her position. The girl dragged one of her trunks out of a recess in the simply-furnished bedchamber, and, sitting down upon it in a half-despondent attitude, reflected on the unlooked-for break in her existence. Once more she was called upon to disunite herself from the past, and begin life anew.
“Am I never to know any rest?” she thought. “I had grown so accustomed to this place. I shall be glad to see the Signora and Richard once more; but Laura, Mr. Monckton,—I wonder whether they will be sorry to lose me?”
By three o’clock in the afternoon all Eleanor’s preparations were completed—her trunks packed, and handed over to the factotum of the Hazlewood establishment, who was to see them safely despatched by luggage-train after the young lady’s departure. At three o’clock precisely Miss Vincent took her seat beside Mrs. Darrell in the low basket-carriage.
Circumstances had conspired to favour the girl’s unnoticed departure from Hazlewood. Laura Mason had been prostrated by the intense strain upon her faculties caused by an hour’s interview with her dressmaker, and had flung herself upon the sofa in the drawing-room, after sopping up half a pint of eau-de-cologne on her flimsy handkerchief. Worn out by her exertions, and lulled by the summer heat, the young lady had fallen into a heavy slumber of two or three hours’ duration.
Launcelot Darrell had left the house almost immediately after the scene in the painting-room, striding out of the hall without leaving any intimation as to the direction in which he was going or the probable hour of his return.
Thus it was that the little pony-carriage drove quietly away from the gates of Hazlewood; and Eleanor left the house in which she had lived for upwards of a year without any one caring to question her as to the cause of her departure.
Very few words were said by either Mrs. Darrell or her companion during the drive to Windsor. Eleanor was absorbed in gloomy thought. She did not feel any intense grief at leaving Hazlewood; but some sense of desolation, some despondency, at the thought that she was a wanderer on the face of the earth, with no real claim upon any one, no actual right to rest anywhere. They drove into Windsor while she was thinking thus. They had come through the park, and they entered the town by the gateway at the bottom of the hill. They had driven up the hill, and were in the principal street below the castle wall, when Mrs. Darrell uttered an exclamation of surprise.
“Launcelot!” she said; “and we must pass him to get to the station. There’s no help for it.”