* * * * *
As he left her house, and turned towards the station Winnington passed a lady to whom he bowed, recognising her as Miss Andrews.
"Hope you've got an umbrella!" he said to her cheerily, as he passed.
"The rain's coming!"
She smiled, pleased like all the world to be addressed with that Winningtonian manner which somehow implied that the person addressed was, for the moment at any rate, his chiefest concern. Immediately after meeting him she turned from the village street, and began to mount a lane leading to the slope on which Monk Lawrence stood. Her expression as she walked along, sometimes with moving lips, had grown animated and sarcastic. Here were two men, a dead father and a live guardian, trying to coerce one simple girl—and apparently not making much of a job of it. She gloried in what she had been told or perceived of Delia Blanchflower's wilfulness, which seemed to her mother and her brother the Captain so monstrous. Only—could one entirely trust anybody like Delia Blanchflower—so prosperous—and so good-looking?
Miss Andrews mounted the hill, passed through a wood that ran along its crest, and took a footpath, leading past the edge of a railway cutting, from which the wonderful old house could be plainly seen. She paused several times to look at it, wrapped in a kind of day-dream, which gave a growing sombreness to her harsh and melancholy features. Beyond the footpath a swing gate opened into a private path leading to the house.
She opened the gate, and walked a little way up the path, in the fast gathering darkness. But she was suddenly arrested by the appearance of a figure in the far distance, black against the pale greys of the house. It was a policeman on his beat—she caught one of the gleams of a lantern.
Instantly she turned back, groped her way again through the wood, and into a side road leading to her brother's house.
She found her mother lying on the sofa in the drawing-room, the remains of a rather luxurious tea beside her—her outdoor clothes lying untidily about the room.
"Where have you been?" said Mrs. Andrews, fretfully—"there were several letters I wanted written before post."
"I wanted a little air. That linen business took me all the morning."