“I’m going home,” said Pixie eloquently. Her radiant face made such a striking contrast to that other bleached, frightened-looking visage that the father’s heart softened as he looked from one to the other. He took Lottie’s hand and drew it tenderly through his arm.
“And so is Lottie, and if her parents seem stern with her, it is only because they are anxious for her good. She perhaps hardly realises the bitter pain it gives them to see her unhappy.”
“Father!” cried Lottie eagerly, and now for the first time she clung to him instead of shrinking out of sight, and seemed to find comfort in the touch of his hand. The fifth-form girls, peeping cautiously out of the window a few minutes later, were amazed to see her descend the steps holding tightly to his arm, but they were too much engrossed with their own exciting preparations to have time to ponder over the phenomenon. Only Miss Phipps and Pixie knew that the “grey man” had a tender heart despite his sternness, and that Lottie had fallen into wise and loving care.
The next morning all was excitement and bustle, cabs and omnibuses driving up to the door of Holly House to convey parties of pupils to the station, gushing farewells and promises to write taking place on the staircase, mysterious bundles, “not to be opened until Christmas morning,” slipped into trunks at the last moment, and such racings up and down stairs in search of things forgotten as can be better imagined than described when thirty girls half-mad with excitement are on the point of starting for home.
Mademoiselle and Pixie were among the first to leave, and, despite the very early hour of their departure, came in for such a magnificent “send off” that they felt quite like royal personages as they drove away from the door. Meals would be supplied on train and boat, but they were laden with other comforts for the long journey in the shape of sweets, scent, books to read, and, alas! specifics against sea-sickness. Mademoiselle looked pensive whenever she thought of the hours on board the boat, but for the rest she was as gay as one of the girls themselves, and much interested in the country through which they flew. One great town after another appeared, and was left behind as they roared through the stations, seeing nothing but a blur of white faces and undecipherable letters upon a board. Hour after hour and never a stop, morning changing into afternoon, and still no slackening of that wonderful onward rush. Two o’clock, and then, just as Pixie was beginning to nod after her lunch, a sudden cry of admiration came from Mademoiselle by her side, and there, close at hand, so near that but a step would have taken them upon the beach, lay the beautiful, mysterious sea, its waters shining in the winter sunshine, the breakers making a ridge of white along the yellow shore. The bathing vans were drawn up on the shingle, and there were no active little figures running to and fro digging castles on the sands, no nigger minstrels and gingerbread stalls and swarms of donkey-boys. All was still and bare and lifeless, and as the short day closed in there was an eeriness about the scene which made the travellers glad to draw the curtains over the windows, and which gave an added cheeriness to the prospect of tea. When Holyhead was reached, Mademoiselle lifted her bag and walked on board the steamer with the air of a martyr marching to the stake, and, to Pixie’s dismay, laid herself down at once with an utter disregard of the tables spread out in the saloon. She waited in what patience she could command until they were well on their way and the preparations for the evening meal grew more advanced, and then it was impossible to remain silent any longer.
“Would ye not be taking something to warm ye, Mademoiselle?” she inquired anxiously. “There’s a lovely smell of cooking—two smells. One of them is cabbage, and the other smells like gravy spilt in the oven. Doesn’t it make you hungry, that nice greasy smell?”
But Mademoiselle only groaned and bade her eat a biscuit and be silent; so for mere occupation’s sake the wisest thing seemed to be to go to sleep, which she proceeded to do with extraordinary quickness. Such an amount of groanings and clanking of chains mingled with her dreams that they naturally took the shape of confinement within prison walls, where she suffered many and wonderful adventures, and from which she was on the point of escaping under the most romantic circumstances when she was seized in the grasp of the jailer, as she at first supposed, but it turned out to be Mademoiselle herself—such a haggard, dishevelled Mademoiselle!—who bade her get up and put on her hat, for the sea was crossed at last, and they were anchored at the quay at Dublin. Pixie felt as if roused in the middle of the night, and altogether it was a most dejected-looking couple who went shivering across the gangway in the pouring rain and made their way to the train for the third and last stage of the journey. Neither spoke, but just lay prone against the cushions of the railway carriage, so much asleep as to be uncomfortably aware that they were awake, so much awake as to long hopelessly for sleep. Mademoiselle determined drearily to send for her aged father, and spend the rest of her life in enforced exile on this grey, rain-swept island, since never, never again could she summon up courage to cross that dreadful sea, and the night seemed half over when Bally William was reached at last.
The station clock was pointing to eleven, and a broken-down fly was waiting to convey the travellers to their destination. In the dim light the surroundings looked both poor and squalid, but porter and flyman vied with one another in a welcome so warm that it went far to dissipate the cheerlessness of the scene.
Pixie discoursed with them in animated fashion the while the trunks were being hoisted to their places.
“Has anyone been here from the Castle to-day, Dennis? They are all quite well, I suppose?”