"That's all you're good for when you've been in a trap—to die. Being in a trap breaks parts of you that can never be mended. It's always kind to kill broken things."
He stood hesitating a moment, then suddenly he flushed awkwardly, pulled off his cap and turned away.
Tony stared after him. She saw him go with bowed head across the field. Half way he dropped the rabbit, but he did not stop. He walked straight to the fence, and climbed over it into the lane.
An impulse seized her—she could not account for it, but she suddenly turned to follow him. She wanted to thank him again, perhaps—to ask him something, she scarcely knew what. But he was gone. There was only the dead rabbit, lying still warm in the grass.
CHAPTER VII OVER THE GATES OF PARADISE
The next day was the day Janet had promised to have tea with Quentin at Redpale Farm. She had prepared for it carefully, telling her brothers she was going shopping in East Grinstead, and would not be home till late.
As soon as dinner was over, she slipped upstairs to dress. She was in a state of fever, and for the first time thought of her clothes. She had never troubled about them when she went to meet Quentin in the woods, but now she was going to his house—a thrill ran through her; she had never in her life been inside Redpale Farm, but now she would see the room where Quentin sat and thought of her in the long, dark evenings—which he had told her of so often—when the stars crawled through veils of wrack, and the wind piped down the valley of the hammer ponds.
Memories of his few pronouncements on clothes rose to guide her. He liked her to come to him as a fragment of the day on which he waited. To-day was a brown day, hiding under rags of mist from a pale, sun-washed sky—so she put on a brown dress, of a long-past fashion, and mended in places, but beautiful in clinging folds about her—and in her breast she pinned the last yellow rose of the garden.