“Why, I mean that you can’t turn her out of the house, or say you don’t want her, or anything of that sort. But I’m sure”—here, the round, pale eyes opened appealingly over the buff-coloured cheeks—“I’m sure, James, that if you don’t wish to take her out with you she’d never dream of expecting you to do so. She’s very unselfish,—besides, she’s so happy with her books.”
“Books—books!—hang books!” he exclaimed, irascibly. “There’s another drawback! If there’s one thing people object to more than another, it’s a bookish spinster! Any assumption of knowledge in a woman is quite enough to keep her out of society!”
His wife yawned.
“I dare say!” she admitted. “But I can’t help it.”
“You want to go to sleep,—that’s what you want!” said Mr. May, contemptuously. “Well, sleep!—I’m going over to the Club.”
She murmured an inward “Thank God!” and settled down in her chair to her deferred and much desired doze. Mr. May threw on his cap,—one of a jaunty shape, which he fondly imagined gave him the look of a dashing sportsman of some thirty summers—and stepped out on to the now fully moonlit lawn, crossing it at as “swinging” a pace as his little legs would allow him, and making for the high road just outside the garden gates.
Not till he had disappeared did the figure which had stayed statuesquely still between the two rose hedges show any sign of movement. Then it stirred, its dark grey draperies swaying like mist in a light wind. The bright moonlight fell on its uplifted face,—Diana’s face, pale always, but paler than ever in that ghostly radiance from the skies. She had heard all,—and there was a curious sense of tightening pain in her throat and round her heart, as if an overflow of tears or laughter struggled against repression. She had stood in such a motionless attitude of strained attention that her limbs felt cramped and stiff, so that when she began to walk it was almost with difficulty. She turned her back to the house and went towards the sea, noiselessly opening the little white gate that led to the shore. She was soon on the smooth soft sand where the little wet pools glittered like silver in the moon, and, going to the edge of the sea, she stood awhile, watching wave after wave glide up in small, fine lines and break at her feet in a delicate fringe of snowy foam. She was not conscious of any particularly keen grief or hurt feeling at the verdict of her general tiresomeness which her parents had passed upon her,—her thoughts were not in any way troubled; she only felt that the last thing she had clung to as giving value to life,—her affection and duty towards the old people,—was counted as valueless,—she was merely “in the way.” Watching the waves, she smiled,—a pitiful little smile.
“Poor old dears!” she said, tenderly,—and again: “Poor old dears!”
Then there arose within her another impulse,—a suggestion almost wildly beautiful,—the idea of freedom! No one wanted her,—not even her father or her mother. Then was she not at liberty? Could she not go where she liked? Surely! Just as a light globe of thistledown is blown by the wind to fall where it will, so she could drift with the movement of casual things anywhere,—so long as she troubled nobody by her existence.
“The world is wide!” she said, half-aloud, stretching her arms with an unconscious gesture of appeal towards the sea. “I have stayed too long in one small corner of it!”