“Dear Robin, I’m so pleased!” she told him. “If I’d been choosing a wife for you myself I couldn’t have chosen any one nicer than Cara!”
“Glad you’re pleased,” Robin returned gruffly—the gruffness being merely the cloak to conceal his own riotous felicity which every Englishman in similar circumstances thinks it necessary to assume. But Ann saw through it, and was not to be deterred from frank rejoicing.
“It will be perfectly lovely to have my best friend married to my best brother,” she continued. “Where shall you live? At the Priory or the Cottage?”
“We haven’t got as far as making such world-shaking decisions as that,” he grinned. “Perhaps we might live at the Priory and week-end at the Cottage”—whimsically.
Ann found a further cause for rejoicing in the continued absence of Brett Forrester. She had never seen him again since the morning when, with an intense feeling of relief, she had watched the Sphinx steam out from Silverquay harbour. Lady Susan was much too incensed against him to invite him to White Windows, and Ann rested fairly secure in the hope that she would never see him again, or, at least, not until she was Eliot’s wife. After that, she felt she would not be afraid to meet him. He could work her no more harm then.
So that it was with a light Heart that she finally started on her journey to London to stay with the Brabazons. Eliot saw her off at the station.
“If you stop a day longer than a fortnight I shall come and fetch you back,” he informed her despotically. “I’m not going to spare my girl to any one for more than two weeks. And I grudge even that.”
And Ann, leaning out of the carriage window and waving her hand to the tall, beloved figure on the platform, felt no premonition, was conscious of no ominous foreboding that the train which was bearing her so swiftly away from him was actually carrying her straight towards the very danger from which she felt so sure she had escaped.
In the patch of brilliant sunshine which lay all about her, the grey shadow had paled until it had become almost imperceptible. But it was still there—only waiting for the sun to move a little in the heavens to fling itself blackly across her path once more.