Gone to Earth

by Mary Gladys Meredith Webb

'What 'un?'

Mrs. Marston was silent for a moment. 'The sixth from the end,' she said; 'it's not nice for a minister's wife.'

'What mun I say?'

Mrs. Marston was in a difficulty. 'Well,' she said at last, 'Edward should not have given you any cause to say anything.'

Hazel blazed into loyalty.

'I'm sure I'm very much obleeged to Ed'ard,' she said, 'and I like 'em better for showing my legs. Oh, here be Ed'ard! Ed'ard, these be proper stockings, inna they?'

Edward glanced at them, and said indifferently that they were. As he did so, a line that had lately appeared on his forehead became very apparent.

In her room upstairs, papered with buttercups and daisies by Edward himself, and scented by a bunch of roses he had given her, Hazel thought about Hunter's Spinney. Edward would not like her to go, and Edward had been kind—kinder than anyone had ever been. He had extended his kindness to Foxy also. 'I'm sure Foxy's much obleeged,' she thought. 'No, she could never tell Edward about Hunter's Spinney. If he questioned her, she knew that she would lie. He would certainly not be pleased. He might be very angry. Mrs. Marston would not like it at all; she would talk about a minister's wife. Reddin had said she must go, but she must not.' She smelt the roses.

'No,' she said, 'I must ne'er go to the Hunter's Spinney—not till doom breaks!' She said her prayers under the shelter of that resolve, with a supplementary one written out very neatly in gold ink by Edward, who wrote, as his mother said, 'a parchment script.'

But when she lay down she could not keep her mind clear of Reddin; during each meeting with him she had been more perturbed. His personality dragged at hers. Already he was stronger than her fugitive impulses, her wilding reserve. He was like a hand tearing open a triplet of sorrel leaves folded for rain, so strong in their impulse for self-protection that they could only be conquered by destruction. She was afraid of him, yet days without him were saltless food. There was a ruthlessness about him—the male instinct unaccompanied by humility, the patrician instinct unaccompanied by sympathy, the sportsman's instinct unaccompanied by pity. Whatever he began he would finish. What had he now begun?