“I’ll go out and have a talk with Edred now about this business. I shall be too busy in the morning. You go to bed.” He tried to see her face through the teasing dusk which had drawn between them; his voice was tender. “You’ve been doing too much lately. Good-night, dear. Have a long night’s rest.”
“Good-night.”
As she undressed, slipping her petticoats from her waist to her feet, she saw through the half-drawn dimity curtains the two men and the dog strolling about in the uncertain moonlight. Jethro looked magnificently broad and kingly. When she stretched herself in the bed, almost sinking in the feathers, she told herself that this might be her last night at Folly Corner. Before she went to sleep she recalled Jethro’s girth and bearing, together with his balance at the bank, and hesitated.
[CHAPTER XII.]
NEXT morning when she awoke workmen were hammering and whistling. When she looked out of her window she saw scaffolding. Long ladders were set up stealthily against the old red walls. They were getting Folly Corner ready for a bride. Those long ladders, that swung scaffolding, reminded her that her wedding-day was fixed. She dressed and went down into the garden, where the roses were all embroidered with dew and a white mist puffed slowly across the meadows beyond the hedge. It was very early. Len Daborn, going heavily to his work, looked like a patriarch, with his crook-like stick and spreading white beard. She thought of his daughters, all maids—because the bees had swarmed in the thatch. She was very anxious to see Edred before breakfast, and, picking up one of the potatoes which Daborn had left on the ground when he took the trug to Hone, threw it in at the open window, crying, with meretricious raillery:
“Come down. It is a lovely morning.”
She tried to speak quite airily, purposely choosing her words and tone. Jethro was already about—looking after the young turkeys. Edred, his voice muffled by sleep and the drawn curtains, called out that he wouldn’t be long. She healed her heart by looking at her roses. The garden always comforted her—drew her to it with strange, silent magnetism. Before he came down, heavy-eyed and irritable, as he always was in the early morning, she had decided, with infinite relief, that she would stay at Folly Corner, and let him go back alone, fight life alone, take his garish triumphs and risks without her.
“Jethro’s going to give you the two hundred pounds this morning,” she said tersely, hardly lifting her head.
“You are a brick, Pam. We can leave here this afternoon. Pretend that you have promised to take me over to Annie Jayne’s. We’ll bike to the station. Never mind luggage. I can spare you plenty of frocks out of the two hundred. London to-night. We’ll dine somewhere—a good dinner. Then I’ll drive you to Bloomsbury—they’ll take you in. I can go to a hotel. To-morrow I’ll get a license and we’ll be married.”