"In that letter I wrote you! I ought to have apologised to you for that letter long ago. I am afraid it was an exercise. Oh, I felt it, I suppose, when I wrote it."
There was a touch of something insolent in his voice.
She made no reply. If it had not been for the necessity which yoked them, she would not have spent another minute in his company, so repellent to her had he become—both in the inner and the outer man. She tried only to think of him as an ally in a desperate campaign.
They hastened up the Monk Lawrence drive. The house stood still and peaceful in the February afternoon. The rooks from the rookery behind were swirling about and over the roofs, filling the air with monotonous sound which only emphasized the silence below. A sheet of snowdrops lay white in the courtyard, where a child's go-cart upset, held the very middle of the stately approach to the house.
Delia went to the front door, and rang the bell—repeatedly. Not a sound, except the dim echoes of the bell itself from some region far inside.
"No good!" said Lathrop. "Now come to the back." They went round to the low addition at the back of the house, where Daunt and his family had now lived for many months. Here also there was nobody. The door was locked. The blinds were drawn down. Impossible to see into the rooms, and neither calling nor knocking produced any response.
Lathrop stood thinking.
"Absolutely against orders! I know—for Daunt himself told me—that he had promised Lang never to leave the house without putting some deputy he could trust in charge. He has gone and left no deputy—or the deputy he did leave has deserted."
"What's the nearest house—or cottage?"
"The Gardeners' cottages, beyond the kitchen garden. Only one of them occupied now, I believe. Daunt used to live there before he moved into the house. Let's go there!"