“Geoff and I are going for a week’s blow on Dartmoor, just by way of a ‘pick-me-up.’ Come with us, Jean; it will do you good after stuffy old London—blow the cobwebs away!”
But here, at least, Jean felt that discretion was the better part of valour. It was true that Burke appeared fairly amenable to reason just at present, but in the informal companionship of daily life in a moorland bungalow it was more than probable that he would become less manageable. And she had no desire for a repetition of that scene in the inn parlour.
Therefore, although the Moor, with its great stretches of gold and purple, its fragrant, heatherly breath and its enfolding silences, appealed to her in a way in which nothing else on earth seemed quite to appeal, pulling at her heartstrings almost as the nostalgia for home and country pulls at the heartstrings of a wanderer, she returned a regretful negative to Judith’s invitation. So Burke and Mrs. Craig packed up and departed to Three Fir Bungalow without her, and life at Staple resumed the even tenor of its way.
The weather was glorious, the long, hot summer days melting into balmy nights when the hills and dales amid which the old house was set were bathed in moonlight mystery—transmuted into a wonderland of phantasy, cavernous with shadow where undreamed-of dragons lurked, lambent with opalescent fields of splendour whence uprose the glimmer of half-visioned palaces or the battlemented walls of some ethereal fairy castle.
More than once Jean’s thoughts turned wistfully towards the Moor which she had so longed to see by moonlight—Judith’s “holy of holies that God must have made for His spirits”—and she felt disposed to blame herself for the robust attack of caution which had impelled her to refuse the invitation to the bungalow.
“One loses half the best things in life by being afraid,” she told herself petulantly. “And a second chance to take them doesn’t come!”
She felt almost tempted to write to Judith and propose that she should join her at the bungalow for a few days after all if she still had room for her. And then, as is often the way of things just when we are contemplating taking the management of affairs into our own hands, the second chance offered itself without any directing impulse on Jean’s part.
The telephone bell rang, and Jean, who was expecting an answer to an important message she had ’phoned through on Lady Anne’s behalf, hastened to answer it. Very much to her surprise she found that it was Burke who was speaking at the other end of the wire.
“Is that you, Geoffrey?” she exclaimed in astonishment. “I didn’t know your bungalow was on the telephone. I thought you were miles from anywhere!”
“It isn’t. And we are,” came back Burke’s voice. From a certain quality in it she knew that he was smiling. “I’m in Okehampton, ’phoning from a pal’s house. I’ve a message for you from Judy.”