“That doesn’t sound very logical. Still, I don’t mind.”
The dictator in Joan Gaunt was speaking, but Eve was not irked by her tyranny on this particular morning. She was ready to laugh gently, to bear with these two women, whose ignorance was so pathetic. She would be content to spend the day alone, sitting under one of the elms at the end of the bowling green, and letting herself dream. The consciousness that she was on the edge of a crisis did not worry her, for somehow she believed that the problem was going to solve itself.
Joan Gaunt and Lizzie Straker started out from Basingford soon after nine, and chartered a small boy, who, for the sum of a penny, consented to act as guide to Fernhill. But all this was mere strategy, and when they had got rid of the boy, they turned aside into the fir woods instead of presenting themselves at the office where would-be visitors were supposed to interview one of the clerks. Joan Gaunt had a rough map drawn on a piece of note-paper, a map that had been sent down from headquarters. They explored the fir woods and the heath lands between Fernhill and Orchards Corner, and after an hour’s hunt they discovered what they had come in search of—Canterton’s new cottage standing with white plaster and black beams between the garden of rocks and the curtained gloom of the fir woods.
Joan Gaunt scribbled a few additional directions on the map. They struck a rough sandy road that was used for carting timber, and this woodland road joined the lane that ran past Orchards Corner. It was just the place for Galahad’s car to be hidden in while they made their night attack on the empty cottage.
In the meanwhile Eve was sitting under one of the elms at the end of the bowling green with a letter-pad on her knees. She had concluded that her comrades had designs upon Canterton’s property, that they meant to make a wreck of his glass-houses and rare plants, or to set fire to the sheds and offices, and she had not the slightest intention of suffering any such thing to happen. She was amused by the instant thoroughness of her own treachery. Her impulses had deserted without hesitation to the opposite camp.
She wrote:
“I am writing in case I should not see you to-day. My good comrades are Militants, and your name is anathema. I more than suspect that some part of your property will be attacked to-night. I send you a warning. But I do not want these comrades of mine to suffer because I choose to play renegade. Balk them and let them go.
“I am thinking hard,
“Eve.”
She wrote “Important ” and “Private” on the envelope, and appealed to the proprietor of the “Black Boar” to provide her with a reliable messenger to carry her letter to Fernhill. An old gentleman was taking a glass of beer in the bar, and this same old gentleman lived as a pensioner in one of the Fernhill cottages. He was sent out to see Eve, who handed him a shilling and the letter.