At first she half struggled to her feet, and they failed her. Then she fell back in the chair helplessly, like a woman with an overstrained spine. That voice! His voice! No. It couldn’t be. There was very little in a voice; each individual had not the monopoly of one. Now, a face would be different. How absurd she was! The dates did not agree. She had a head for dates, and that one—the date of his release—had eaten into her brain like an acid into metal. It was too soon.
The air through the open window—she had opened it herself only a minute ago, before the world changed—was warm. The full red heads of the geraniums nodded heavily with occasional puffs of vigorous March wind. It was a warm, noisy world. The beseeching, persistent bleat of the little new lambs rung like a mournful bell with every second, and through it filtered the confused song of every madly happy bird that had mated and built a nest.
She put out her hand again for the bell, calling herself a fanciful, nervous fool. As she gripped the handle she heard the voice again—persuasive, winning. Hadn’t she often heard it like that? It said:
“You can have one by very easy payments.”
The bell fell on the table, rolled off, and clanged its noisy tongue as it touched the oak floor. The pretty, ruddy housemaid came in, looked flurried. She left the kitchen door wide behind her, and Pamela saw the well-scrubbed table, the gleaming brass preserving-pan on top of an oak corner cupboard in which candles, soaps, and so on were stored. She could, with the tail of her eye, see the back door leading to the flagged yard, and she seemed to feel that he was standing there. Certainly someone was there, because the sheep dog, who was so savage on the chain, barked angrily.
“I want my bicycle,” she said as calmly as she could, “and, Nettie, who is that at the back door?”
“A piker—I beg pardon, miss—a tramp. Yet not just a piker; he never begged. But he wants me and Cook to buy a sewing-machine, paying it off by little bits each month.”
“I shouldn’t like the noise of a sewing-machine in the kitchen.”
“Then I’ll tell him to go away.”
“Nettie.”