"Decent chap, Willerby," murmured John wistfully, but he did not suggest that they should go.
They stayed in the house and garden all the remaining hours of the long, hot day. But nobody called.
Monday morning dragged on through a cloud of steam and scolding and the scent of soap and wet linen. Mary had spent two sleepless nights. After dinner she found the stifling atmosphere of the wash-house unendurable. John had ridden over to Littledale. The clothes drooped lazily from long lines in the sunlit paddock. Mary escaped to her room and changed her dress.
Half an hour later she hurried through the stackyard and passed up the chalk road that shimmered, dazzlingly white, between its borders of sun-dried grass and ripening corn. There was no shade, but Mary never noticed the sun beating down on her head and shoulders from a cloudless sky. She hurried forward and upward, away from the village and mocking street and the garden path up which nobody came. Once she paused in her flight and pressed hot, dry fingers across her throbbing temples.
There were footsteps behind her, hurrying footsteps that stumbled along the deep ruts of the uneven road.
She was sick of footsteps and voices and torturing shadows. Again she resumed her rapid climb, shutting her ears to the sound behind her, resolutely refusing to turn her head.
A low branch of hawthorn from the hedge reached out and caught at her skirt. She wore an old-fashioned dress of green muslin with a skirt that flowed about her like a cool, soft sea. It was not made for scrambling walks across the fields. She bent to disentangle it with trembling fingers. Again the footsteps sounded behind her, drawing nearer up the road.
Impatiently she jerked her skirt free from the thorns, only to find that in her reckless movement she had caught herself again by the sleeve. She pricked her fingers, but the muslin remained twisted with devilish ingenuity among the thorns. Tears of impotent anger trembled in her eyes.
"Can I help, Mrs. Robson?" asked David.
For a little while she neither spoke nor turned, but stood quite still staring at her torn sleeve and the dusty hawthorn.