Hester, however, did not go very far up the lane. She sank down very soon on a jutting stone beneath the left-hand wall, with her bag beside her, and sat there looking at the little house. It was a pleasant, home-like place, even on this bitter afternoon. In one of the windows was a glow of firelight; white muslin curtains everywhere gave it a dainty, refined look; and it stood picturesquely within the shelter of its trees, and of the yew hedge which encircled the garden.
Yet Hester shivered as she looked at it. She was very imperfectly clothed for such an afternoon, in a serge jacket and skirt supplemented by a small fur collarette, which she drew closer round her neck from time to time, as though in a vain effort to get warm. But she was not conscious of doing so, nor of the cold as cold. All her bodily sensations were miserable and uncomfortable. But she was only actively aware of the thoughts racing through her mind.
There they were, within a stone's throw of her—Mary and Mrs. Elsmere—in the warm, cosy little house, without an idea that she, Hester, the wretched, disgraced Hester, was sitting in the lane so close to them. And yet they were perhaps thinking of her—they must have often thought about her in the last fortnight. Mrs. Elsmere must of course have been sorry. Good people were always sorry when such things happened. And Mary?—who was eight years older—older! than this girl of eighteen who sat there, sickened by life, conscious of a dead wall of catastrophe drawn between her and the future.
Should she go to them? Should she open their door and say—"Here I am!—Horrible things have happened. No decent person will ever know me or speak to me again. But you said—you'd help me—if I wanted it. Perhaps it was a lie—like all the rest?"
Then as the reddened eyelids fell with sheer fatigue, there rose on the inward sight the vision of Catharine Elsmere's face—its purity, its calm, its motherliness. For a moment it drew, it touched, it gave courage. And then the terrible sense of things irreparable, grim matters of fact not to be dreamed or thought away, rushed in and swept the clinging, shipwrecked creature from the foothold she had almost reached.
She rose hastily.
"I can't! They don't want to see me—they've done with me. Or perhaps they'll cry—they'll pray with me, and I can't stand that! Why did I ever come? Where on earth shall I go?"
And she looked round her in petulant despair, angry with herself for having done this foolish thing, angry with the loneliness and barrenness of the valley, where no inn opened doors of shelter for such as she, angry with the advancing gloom, and with the bitter wind that teased and stung her.
A little way up the lane she saw a small gate that led into the Elsmeres' garden. She took her bag, and opening the gate, she placed it inside. Then she ran down the lane, drawing her fur round her, and shivering with cold.
"I'll think a bit—" she said to herself—"I'll think what to say.
Perhaps I'll come back soon."