‘Revolutionary!’ said Laura, her eye brightening. ‘Now that’s an idea. Revolutionary. She used to be a little on the pink side. She did it “to annoy Miles and Georgiana”, she used to say. They are her parents. She was never very serious about it; she was much too good-looking to need anything like that. But I might build something on that foundation. Yes. We might make her a revolutionary.’
The quirks that women are reduced to! thought Grant, watching her needle nicker through the wool of the sock she was darning; and went back to considering his own problem. He was still considering it when he went to bed. But before he went to sleep he decided that he would write to Bryce in the morning. It would be to all intents a letter reporting his arrival in these healthful surroundings and his hope to be better in less time than the doctor had given him, but in the course of it he would take the opportunity of putting himself in the right by passing the knowledge of the newspaper’s presence on to those whom it might concern.
He slept the deep uninterrupted sleep induced by fresh air and an unsullied conscience, and woke to an immense silence. The silence was not only out-of-doors; the house itself was in a trance. And Grant suddenly remembered that it was Sunday. There would be no post out of the glen today. He would have to go all the way to Scoone with his letter.
He asked Tommy at breakfast if he might borrow the car to go to Scoone to post an important letter, and Laura offered to drive him. So as soon as breakfast was over he went back to his room to compose the letter, and in the end was very pleased with it. He brought the matter of B Seven into the texture of it as neatly as an invisible mender fits an unbelonging piece to the over-all pattern. He had not been able to shake the memory of work from him as soon as he might, he said, because the first thing he had been confronted with at the end of the journey was a dead body. The body was being furiously shaken by an enraged sleeping-car attendant who thought that the man was just sleeping it off. However, it had been none of his business, thank Heaven. His only part in the affair had been to purloin unintentionally a newspaper from the compartment. He had found it among his own when he was having breakfast. It was a Signal, and he would have taken it for granted that it was his own property if it had not been that in the Stop Press space someone had been pencilling a scribbled attempt at verse. The verse was in English and in English writing, and might not have been written by the dead man at all. He understood that the inquest was being held in London. If Bryce thought that it was of any importance he might hand on the small item of information to the relevant authority.
He came downstairs again to find the Sabbath atmosphere shattered. The house rocked with war and rebellion. Pat had discovered that someone was going in to Scoone (which in his country eyes was even on a Sunday a metropolis of delectable variety) and he wanted to go too. His mother, on the other hand, was determined that he was going to Sunday school as usual.
‘You ought to be very glad of the lift,’ she was saying, ‘instead of grumbling about not wanting to go.’
Grant thought that ‘grumbling’ was a highly inadequate word to describe the blazing opposition that lighted Pat like a torch. He throbbed with it, like a car at rest with the engine running.
‘If we didn’t happen to be going in to Scoone you would have to walk to the church as usual,’ she reminded him.
‘Huch, who ever minds walking! We have fine talks when we’re walking, Duggie and me.’ Duggie was the shepherd’s son. ‘It’s wasting time at Sunday school when I might be going to Scoone that’s a fact. It’s not fair.’
‘Pat, I will not have you referring to Sunday school as a waste of time.’