Chapter Three.
The Girl who Wished for Adventure.
The girl who had wished for adventure journeyed back to her native village two days after the New Year’s party, and spent the following eighteen months in tramping monotonously along a well-worn rut. The only difference made by that oft-remembered conference was in her point of view. Before that date she had sighed for the unattainable; after it, the unattainable became the possible. Some day, if she but waited, opportunity would come; some day the end of a thread would float downward towards her hand, and grasping it, she would be led into a new world! To the best of her power, she cultivated this attitude, and each monotonous month, as it dragged past, added strength to her determination to snatch the first opportunity that came her way.
At the end of eighteen months the girl packed up her trunk, and left home to pay a dull visit to a great-aunt.
“Don’t expect me to write letters,” she said to her family at parting, and the family groaned in chorus, and cried: “Please, don’t! It’s quite enough for one of us to be victimised. Spare us the echoes of Aunt Eliza! Just send a postcard when you’re coming back.”
Great-aunt Eliza was a daunting old lady who prided herself upon speaking the truth.
“Goodness! How you have gone off,” was the first remark which she hurled at her great-niece’s head, after the conventional greetings had been exchanged. She poured out a cup of strong, stewed tea, and offered a slice of leathery muffin. “And you used to be quite nice looking!”
Juliet smiled with the laboured brightness of a wallflower in a ballroom, and said, but did not for a moment mean: