It was such a strange thing to leave the house in the middle of the night, she could hardly believe that she was awake. She opened the door very cautiously and listened, but all was dark and still, save for the ticking of the old-fashioned clock in the passage below. She went softly down and waited and listened again, but no one had heard her. Along the passage to the back door, for there were not so many bolts to it as to the front one, and it could be opened more gently. The key was hanging on a hook, she took it down, turned it in the lock, drew back the one long bolt, and stepped out. The summer air came soft and cool upon her face, but the sky was clouded. She drew the door to, locked it outside, and slipped the key under it back into the passage, and stood a fugitive in the darkness. She grasped her bag tightly and went softly over the stones that were just outside the back door, and so round to the garden, down the green pathway and through the gate; it closed with a click, and she wondered if Hannah heard it in her sleep; across the field and over the stile—she thought of Mr. Garratt—into the next field, and then suddenly she realized the folly of this headlong departure. She might at least have waited till the morning, for there was no train till six o'clock. She had five or six hours in which to walk as many miles. She sat down on the step of the stile and strained her eyes to see the trees that made her cathedral, but they were only a mass of blackness in the night; she left her bag by the stile, and went back across the field to the garden gate, and looked at the house once more, and at her mother's darkened window, then went back again to the stile. Gradually the natural exultation of youth came over her.
"I'm going to London," she said, breathlessly, "to seek my fortune just as Dick Whittington did, and as Lena Lakeman said I ought to have done."
She stooped and felt the grass—it was quite dry; she used her bag as a pillow, and pulled her cloak round her and stretched herself out to rest for an hour or two on the soft green ground. "Oh, if mother could know that I was lying here in the fields, what would she say? But it's lovely with the cool air coming on my face, and I have a sense of being free already."
But sleep would not come; she was restless and excited, and it seemed as if the shadows of all the people she had known crowded about her. She could feel her mother's hand upon her head, hear Hannah scolding, and see her father holding aloof—till she could bear it no longer. She sat up and looked round; the dawn was beginning; in the dim light she could see the green of the grass.
"Dear land," she said, as she put her head down once more, "when shall I walk over you again towards my mother's house?"
XXII
Margaret's heart beat fast as the hansom stopped at the house in Great College Street. Mrs. Gilman opened the door.
"Miss Hunstan went away on Saturday night, miss," she said; "she's gone to Germany for three weeks."