It was impossible for her to stay at Eltham House, utterly impossible. This man Leigh had told her he should see little or nothing of her at the place, and yet when she reached the house his was the first face and figure she laid eyes on. He had opened the door for her and welcomed her to Eltham House, and on the very threshold he had attempted to kiss her! Great heavens! it was incredibly horrible, but it was true! The first man who had ever dared to try to kiss her was this odious beast, this misshapen fiend, this scented monster!
Ugh! The very attempt was degradation.
The girl shuddered and looked around her into the dim, dark gloom abroad, beyond the trees where the grass and corn lay under the invisible sky, and where the darkness of the shadow of trees did not reach.
And yet, when she halted here, she had been on her way back to Eltham House! There was no alternative. She had nowhere else to go. For lack of courage and money she could not venture upon an hotel. She had never been from home alone before, and she felt as if she were in a new planet. She was not desperate, but she was awkward, timid, afraid.
Wet and lonely as the night was, she would have preferred walking about till morning rather than return to that house, if going back involved again meeting that horrible man. All the time she was in the house he had forced his odious, insolent attentions upon her. He had followed her about the passages, and lain in wait for her with expostulations for her prudery in not allowing him to welcome her in patriarchal fashion to his house! Patriarchal fashion, indeed! He had himself said he knew he was not an Adonis, but that he was not a Methuselah either, and his poor, simple, paralysed mother told her he was thirty-five years old. She would not take all the money in the world to stay in a house to which he was free. At eight o'clock that evening she had pleaded fatigue and retired to her own room for the night. She then had no thought of immediate flight. When she found herself alone with the door locked, she thought over the events of the day and her position, and in the end made up her mind to escape and return to town at once, that very evening. She wrote a line to the effect that she was going, and placed it on the dressing-table by the window.
Her room was on the ground-floor, and the window wide open. Mrs. Brown, the only servant at the house, slept not in the house but in the gate lodge. Mrs. Brown had told her the gate was never locked until eleven o'clock, when she locked it before going to bed in the lodge. So that if she got back at any hour before eleven, she could slip in through the gate and get over the low sill of her bed-room window. She could creep in and change her wet boots and clothes and sit up in the easy-chair till morning. Then she could steal away again, walk to the railway station and take the first train for London.
She felt rested and brave now. She would go on. Heaven grant she might meet no one on the way!
CHAPTER II.
[VOICES OF THE UNSEEN.]
Edith Grace gathered her cloak around her and began walking once more. The road, under the heavy trees, was now blindly dark. She had taken nothing out of that house but the clothes she wore, not even her dressing bag. In the first place, she had not cared to encumber herself; and, in the second place, if she by chance met Mrs. Brown or Oscar Leigh, she would not appear to be contemplating flight. She could write for her trunk and bag when she found herself safely at home once more.