Then she turned away towards the house, walking slowly, however, for she felt weak and faint from the violent weeping so rare to her. And the sun had been beating on her head more than she realised. Like many English people, Winifred did not know the danger of the spring sun—altogether she felt strangely unlike herself.
And Hertha did not keep her in sight, for she herself moved towards the front in search of a shady spot, where she might read Mr Montague’s letter undisturbed.
Chapter Twelve.
After all these Years.
Miss Norreys found the sheltered corner she was in search of, and then she read her letter. It was a very long one, full of interest to her for reasons besides those affecting Winifred. And more than an hour had passed before, at last recalling herself to the present, she rose from her seat to return to the house.
“How perfectly beautiful it is!” she thought. “This place is almost too sunshiny, so far as I have seen it. I should like to know it in winter, or in cloudy weather; I wonder if the ‘White cat’s palace’ feeling could still remain, or if it would seem more commonplace and homely.”
“Homely,” in the sweetest sense of the word, it always was, however. As Hertha went slowly in, crossing the white-panelled entrance hall, and down one or two of the long passages, on a rather roundabout route to her quarters—for she now knew the house well, and felt a fascination in strolling about it—she passed one or two open doors, revealing glimpses of “interiors” which carried her in fancy back by a century or two. There was the still-room as it might have been in the days of the great-great-grandmothers of the present inhabitants; the white-shelved “napery” room with its snowy piles, which one knew by instinct must be lavender-scented; even the girls’ own sitting-room, which she passed on one of the first-floor landings, in spite of the very nineteenth-century piano and easel and wealth of books and book-cases, might, at the first rapid glance, have been the legendary tabby-lady’s own boudoir, with its lattice-paned windows and polished floor.
“It is like no other place in the world,” said Hertha to herself for the twentieth time. “I only wish I could give to poor Winifred some of the quite indescribable charm it has for me. I suppose it is just that she has grown up in it; but yet Celia, and even Louise, feel it almost as I do. Well, Winifred may awake in many ways yet. She will probably love her home better when there is no stifled consciousness of self-reproach mixed up with it. How glad I am she gave in before she—or I—knew the contents of Mr Montague’s letter. I must answer it at once, by the bye.”