Later, as they walked along the street towards Mitchelhurst Place, Scarlett was silent for a time, glancing right and left at the dull cottages. Here and there one might catch a glimpse of firelight through the panes, but most of them were drearily blank, with grey windows and closed doors. It was too cold for the straw-plaiters to stand on their thresholds and gossip while they worked. There was a foreshadowing of snow in the low-hanging clouds.
"What are you thinking of?" Barbara asked him.
"Don't let us ever come here again!" he answered. "It's all very well for this once; we are young enough, we have our happiness before us. But never again! Suppose we were old and sad when we came back, or suppose——" He stopped short. "Suppose one came back alone," should have been the ending of that sentence.
"Very well," she agreed hastily, as if to thrust aside the unspoken words.
"We say our good-bye to Mitchelhurst to-day, then?" Adrian insisted.
"Yes. There won't be any temptation to come again, if what they told us is true—will there?"
She referred to a rumour which they had heard at the Rothwell Arms, that as Mr. Croft could not find a tenant for the Place he meant to pull it down.
"No," said Scarlett. "It seems a shame, though," he added.
Presently they came in sight of the entrance—black bars, and beyond them a stirring of black boughs in the January wind, over the straight, bleak roadway to the house. The young man pushed the gate. "Some one has been here to-day," he said, noting a curve already traced on the damp earth.
"Some one to take the house, perhaps," Barbara suggested. "Look, there's a carriage waiting out to the right of the door. I wish they hadn't happened to choose this very day. I would rather have had the old Place to ourselves, wouldn't you?"