She went upstairs to her room. She leaned on the sill of the open window, looking out, drinking in the sweet air of the autumn fields. The five elms raised golden heads to a blue sky.
Her childhood had died with a little gasp.
Catty came in to unpack her box. Catty, with wet cheeks, kissed a dead child.
XIX
I.
In the train from Bristol to Paddington for the last time: July, eighteen-eighty.
She would never see any of them again: Ada and Geraldine; Mabel and Florrie and little Lena and Kate; Miss Wray with her pale face and angry eyes; never hear her sudden, cold, delicious praise. Never see the bare, oblong schoolroom with the brown desks, seven rows across for the lower school, one long form along the wall for Class One where she and Ada and Geraldine sat apart. Never look through the bay windows over the lea to the Channel, at sunset, Lundy Island flattened out, floating, gold on gold in the offing. Never see magenta valerian growing in hot white grey walls.
Never hear Louie Prichard straining the little music room with Chopin's Fontana Polonaise. Never breathe in its floor-dust with the Adagio of the "Pathetic Sonata."
She was glad she had seen it through to the end when the clergymen's and squires' daughters went and the daughters of Bristol drapers and publicans and lodging-house keepers came.
("What do you think! Bessie Parson's brother marked all her underclothing. In the shop!")