One morning the yearning for a letter grew suddenly quite overmastering; and none came. This was the climax. By a sudden impulse which he never succeeded in explaining to himself on any satisfactory grounds, Mr. Waring went to his bedroom, knelt down by his big chest of drawers, and proceeded to pack a little valise with every article he did not want, leaving out all those he did. Then he stepped into a cab and made for the station.
Towards the close of the day he presented himself at the door of a queer old red-brick manor house in Kent owned by a Colonel Selwyn and his wife, and asked simply for “Miss Grace Selwyn”.
In three months from that day the two came down the path hand in hand and stepped out together on life’s journey, and six months later through the death of a cousin, Waring Park fell to them and made up for the loss of the Fellowship.
CHAPTER III.
The very day after Gwen’s flight into history Mr. and Mrs. Waring walked up to the Rectory and got through their talk with the master of it.
They might not have been altogether so prompt, being still absorbed body and soul in the skeleton, but that, not only was Gwen suffering tortures from the state of her skin through the combined action of paint, paraffin, and other ungents, but into the bargain she had caught a bad and a quite abnormally noisy cold, which kept her presence en evidence by fits and starts whenever she broke loose from the nursery, and which was a weapon judiciously wielded by Mary to keep her parents well up to the mark.
They had delivered themselves to Mr. Fellowes, and were now walking down the Rectory drive, both looking a little pained. Mr. Waring’s disengaged hand was pressed to his forehead and his brows were knit, and Mrs. Waring looked as if she were engaged in a silent struggle against disturbing thoughts.
The air was still and soft, and some stray stars had already taken possession of the evening sky, where the little streaks of rose, left by the sun, looked quite out of place, and felt it too, seemingly, for they were creeping behind the hills with a soft little shiver of dismay, like a timid guest who suddenly discovers that every soul but himself has left.
The silence and the calm helped Mr. and Mrs. Waring, who were both trying to throw off the consideration of minor matters and to return to that of vital affairs. Generally so easy, like the slipping back of a pair of seals into the water after a rugged land journey, to-night this seemed a strangely hard task to tackle.
They often seemed to receive the same impression at the same moment, and something or other in the bright glow of the Rectory study and in the perfectly at-home and at-ease air of a pair of twins that the Rector’s wife had temporary charge of, and had brought in to say good-night, had given them a little jar which would keep on quivering.