Eve threw aside her rug and climbed out. They had stopped on a flinty road among the towering trunks of a wood of Scots firs. The branches high overhead seemed a black tangle hanging in the vague grey light of the dawn. Not a bough moved. The great trees were asleep.
“I’ll be getting on. Running to Oxford. Put ’em off the scent. Write and fix up the next. London address, you know.”
He was saying good-bye, and receiving Lizzie Straker’s more than friendly splutterings. The chauffeur, a swarthy young blackguard, was grinning behind his master’s back. Mr. Lawrence Kentucky stared hard at Eve, for she was good to look at in the dawn light, with the smell of the dew everywhere, and the great trees dreaming overhead.
“Au revoir, Miss Carfax! Hope you’ve enjoyed it.”
She gave him a casual nod, and went and sat down on the bank at the side of the road.
Joan Gaunt and Lizzie Straker, like the hardy veterans that they were, lay down under the trees to snatch an hour or two’s sleep, but Eve felt wakeful and in a mood for thought. The night’s adventure had left her with an impression of paltriness, and she kept picturing the black shell of the burnt house standing pathetically in the midst of its neglected garden. She remembered Lawrence Kentucky’s chuckle, a peculiarly offensive and sneering chuckle. Was that the sort of man who could be called a pioneer of progress, or a knight of Arthur’s Court? It struck her as pathetic that these women should have christened him Galahad. It just betrayed how little they knew about men.
She looked up at the tall trees and was instantly reminded of the fir woods at Fernhill. A quiver of emotion swept through her. It had been just such a dawn as this when she had fled from Orchards Corner. She realised that she was wiser, broader, less sentimental now, and that Canterton had not been the passionate visionary that she had thought him.
Lizzie Straker woke up and shouted “Breakfast!”
The gentlewoman of Horsham had fitted them out royally. They had a tea kettle to boil over a fire of dead wood, a big bottle of water, ham sandwiches, buttered scones, and a tin of Swiss milk. Even a tin opener had been included. That breakfast under Crooksbury Hill reminded Eve of Lynette’s fairy picnics in the Wilderness. The larches would be all covered with green tassels. She wished she was with Lynette in the Wilderness.
Breakfast over, Joan Gaunt brought out her itinerary.