This friend had been a school-fellow—that is to say, she had been one of the older girls when Philippa, a shy child of fourteen, had arrived, unhappy and awkward, among a crowd of new faces in an unknown land. Marion Wells, as she then was, was one of those people in whom the motherly instinct is strong, even in youth. She had taken Philippa under her wing, and being by no means daunted by an apparent want of response which she rightly attributed to its proper cause, a strong friendship had grown up between them, which had continued, in spite of meetings few and far between, until the present day.
Marion had married, very soon after leaving school, a man who, while invalided home from South Africa, had excited her first to pity and then to love. She mothered her big soldier regardless of his stalwart size and now perfect physique much in the same way in which she had mothered Philippa in her childhood, and her loving heart was still further satisfied by the possession of a son, now eight years old.
Bill Heathcote had retired from the army, and was living on a property to which he had succeeded on the death of his grandmother some three years ago.
Lady Lawson's last words returned to Philippa's memory: "Good-bye, my darling child. I do hope you will have a good time!"
She smiled at the recollection. A good time! It was an expression which had been very frequently on her mother's lips, as it is on the lips of so many people now-a-days. It may mean so many things. To Lady Lawson it meant a succession of social gaieties. Well, she thought with thankfulness, these were hardly to be expected at Bessacre.
Marion had expressly stated that Philippa must not look forward to anything of the kind. Their only excitements at this season of the year were a few garden parties which could hardly be called amusing, but that she might have plenty of golf if she cared for the game. Also, if time hung too heavily, they might indulge in the frantic dissipation of motoring over to Renwick and listening to the band on the pier.
Renwick, which had been a quiet fishing village a few years ago, was now metamorphosed with surprising rapidity, by the enterprise of its newly formed Parish Council, into a fashionable watering-place, with pier, concert-hall, esplanade and palatial hotels all complete, for the pleasure and comfort of the summer visitors, and also incidentally for the personal profit of the members of the aforesaid Council: a state of things much regretted by the residents in the neighbourhood, whose peace was disturbed during the holiday season by char-à-bancs and picnic parties. So much Marion Heathcote had explained in her last letter.
Philippa sat enthralled by the beauty of the country through which she passed. The wide-spreading cornfields, the cosy flint farm-houses, with their red roofs, the byres and orchards, the glitter of the placid Broads lying calm and serene under the summer sun, reeds and rushes reflected as in a mirror on the water, which was so still that hardly a ripple disturbed its even surface.
It was so utterly unlike anything she had ever seen that it possessed for her an intense fascination. Later, as she was approaching the end of her journey, her first view of the low heather-crowned hills made her heart thrill.
A freshness in the air, and the curious one-sided appearance of the wind-swept trees, made her aware of the nearness of the sea—then presently she saw it—just a line of deeper blue against the azure of the sky, with the square tower of Renwick Church girdled with clustering red roofs clearly visible in the middle distance.