“Pardon me, I grow distinctly younger every year. Upon my word, sometimes I don’t feel more than eighteen.”
Then Miss Glover made the only repartee of her life.
“I confess I think you look quite twenty-five, Miss Ley,” she replied with a grim smile.
“You impudent creature!” laughed the other, and, telling the coachman to drive on, with a wave of the hand bade good-bye to Miss Glover, the scenes of her youth, and the fields which seemed part of her very blood and her bones.
Since the Dean somewhat curtly declined her offer to stay longer with him, Miss Ley set out next day for London. But a curious unrest had seized her, and she began much to regret her determination to spend the winter in England; Mrs. Murray was already gone to Rome, and the sight of Bella leaving for the Continent had excited still more in Miss Ley’s veins the travel-fever. She pictured to herself all the little delightful bothers of the Custom House, the mustiness of hotel ’buses, the sweet tediousness of long journeys by train, the grateful discomforts of foreign hostelries; she thought with dazzled eyes of the dingy grayness of Boulogne, and her nostrils inhaled the well-known odours of the port and station. Her nerves tingled with eagerness to forsake her house, her servants, and to plunge into the charming freedom of the idle tourist. But the train she was in stopped at Rochester, and her abstracted gaze fixed suddenly on that scene which, she remembered, Basil Kent had once highly extolled: the sky with its massive clouds was sombre, and its restfulness was mirrored on the fiat surface of the Medway; tall chimneys belched winding smoke, a sinuous pattern against the grayness, and the low factory buildings were white with dust; to the observant there was indeed a decorative quality, recalling in its economy of line, in its subdued and careful colour, the elegance of a Japanese print.
Miss Ley sprang up.
“Give me my dressing-bag,” she said to her astonished maid. “You can go on to London. I shall stay here.”
“Alone, madam?”
“D’you think anyone will run away with me! Be quick, or I shall be taken on.”
She seized her bag, jumped out of the carriage, and when the train steamed away gave a great sigh of relief; it quietened her nerves to be alone in a strange town, where none knew her, and walking downstairs she felt a most curious exhilaration. She surveyed the hotel ’buses, chose the most elaborate, and drove off.