A tremulous peace brooded over Brambletye. Birds twittered in the ivy, the tall, capped turrets were outlined against a sky that flushed faintly in the heart of its grey, as the sunset crept up it from the hills. Both Nigel and Tony were silent for a moment, standing there in the peace.
"Fancy my never having been here before," said the girl at last. "How ripping it is!"
"I'm glad I brought you."
"It's strange," continued Tony, as she unfastened the cakes from her bicycle, "that I haven't seen you before—before I met you at East Grinstead, I mean."
"Oh, I've been away, I've not lived at home for some time. You haven't been here long, have you?" He was anxious to shift the conversation from dangerous ground.
"We came to Shovelstrode about three years ago. Before that we lived near Seaford. I go to school at Seaford, you know."
School seemed a fairly safe topic.
"Tell me about your school," he said, as they began to eat the cakes.
School was Tony's paramount absorption, and no one else ever asked her to speak of it. Indeed, on the rare occasions when she expanded of her own accord, her family would silence her with, "Tony, we're sick of that eternal school of yours—one would think it was the whole world, and your home just a corner of it." That was in fact the relative positions of home and school in Tony's mind. School was a world of kindred spirits, of things that mattered, home was a place of exile, to which three times a year one was bundled—and ignored. To her delight she realised that her new friend sympathised with her, and understood her feelings.
"You know, Mr. Smith, how beastly it is to be in a place where every one gets hold of the wrong end of what you say—where you don't seem to fit in, somehow."