Next day Hazel did not go into the woods. In the evening, sitting in the quiet parlour while Edward read aloud and Mrs. Marston knitted, she felt afraid as she remembered it. Yet she had been still more afraid at the idea of going.
She had helped Mrs. Marston to cover rhubarb jam in the dim store-room while Edward visited a sick man at some distance. It had been delightful, gumming on the clean tops, and then writing on them. She had dipped freely into the biscuit-box. Then Edward had returned, and they had gardened again. Now they were settled for the evening, and she was learning to knit, twisting obdurate wool round anarchic needles, while Mrs. Marston—the pink shawl top—chanted: 'Knit, purl! Knit, purl!'
'Will it come to aught ever?' queried Hazel. 'It's nought but a tail o' string now!'
'It will come to anything you like to make, dear,' said the old lady.
'Is knitting so like life, mother?' Edward spoke amusedly.
'But it wunna,' said Hazel. 'It'll only come a tanglement,'
Edward suggested that he should help; there was great laughter over this interlude, while Mrs. Marston still chanted, 'Knit, purl!'
Reddin walked lingeringly past the house in the dark, heard it, and was very angry and miserable.
Hazel heard his step on the rough stones, and was alarmedly sure that it was he. She was terribly afraid he would tell Edward. Then a new idea occurred to her. Should she tell Edward herself?
She sat in the firelight with her head bent, and turned this new thought about in her brain as incompetently as she twisted the blue wool round the needles. And from the silent shadows, as she played with the thread of destiny, two presences eyed each other across her bright head—one armed, the other bearing roses. Neither Mrs. Marston, with her antiphonal 'Double knit, double purl!' nor Edward, reading in his pleasant voice—he rather fancied his reading, and tried not to—saw those impalpable figures, each with a possessive hand outstretched to Hazel pending her decision.