“You have seen your cousin, Jane Smith? Are you alike?”
“I have only seen her once.” Jane grasped her courage, and looked straight at Mr. Ember. He either knew something, or this was just idle teasing. In either case being afraid would not serve her. A spice of humour might.
“You’re frightfully interested in my aunts and cousins,” she said. “Do you want to find another secretary just like me for some one? But I’m afraid my Cousin Jane isn’t available. She’s married to a man in Bolivia.”
At this point Lady Heritage looked over the edge of The Times with a frown, and the conversation dropped. Jane finished her buttered toast, and admired herself because her hand did not shake.
Lady Heritage seemed to be in a frowning mood. This, it appeared, was not one of the days when she disappeared behind the steel grating with Ember, leaving Jane to pursue her appointed tasks in the library. Instead, there was a general sorting of correspondence and checking of work already done, with the result that Jane found herself being played upon, as it were, by a jet or spray of hot water. The temperature varied, but the spray was continuous. A letter to which Lady Heritage particularly wished to refer was not to be found, a package of papers wrongly addressed had come back through the Dead Letter Office, and an unanswered invitation was discovered in the “Answered” file. By three o’clock that afternoon Jane had been made to feel that it was possible that the world might contain a person duller, more inept, and less competent than herself—possible, but not probable.
“I think you had better go for a walk, Miss Molloy,” said Lady Heritage; “perhaps some fresh air....” She did not finish the sentence, and Jane, only too thankful to escape, made haste from the presence.
Ember had been right when he said that the grounds were extensive.
Jane skirted the house and made her way through a space of rather formally kept garden to where a gravel path followed the edge of the cliff. For a time it was bordered by veronica and fuchsia bushes, but after a while these ceased and left the bare down with its rather coarse grass, tiny growing plants, tangled brambles, and bright yellow clumps of gorse. The path went up and down. Sometimes it almost overhung the sea. Always a tall hedge of barbed wire straggled across the view and spoilt it.
The fact that a powerful electric current ran through the wire and made it dangerous to touch added to the dislike with which she regarded it.
It was a grey afternoon with a whipping wind from the north-west that beat up little crests of foam on the lead-coloured waves and made Jane clutch at her hat every now and then. She thought it cold when she started, but by and by she began to enjoy the sense of motion, the wind’s buffets, and the wide, clear outlook. At the farthest point of the headland she stopped, warm and glowing. The path ran out to the edge of the cliff. On the landward side the rock rose sharply, naked of grass, and heaped with rough boulders. A small cave or hollow ran inwards for perhaps four feet. In front of it, in fact almost within it, stood a stone bench pleasantly sheltered by the overhanging rock and curving sides of the hollow. Jane felt no need of shelter. Instead of sitting down, she climbed upon the back of the bench and, steadying herself against a rock, looked out over the wire and saw how the cliff fell away, sheer at first, and then in a series of jagged, tumbled steps until the rocks went down into the sea.