BOOK III
CONNIE
September, 1915—February, 1916
XXVI
Though there was no wind that evening to disturb them, the chintz curtains falling before the morning-room window would not hang quite together. A moth with heavy, powdered wings flopped through the open space and blundered blindly round the flaming gas-jet.
Muriel rose and drew the curtains for the third time. The garden outside lay quietly waiting, black shadows outstretched prostrate before the moonlit elms. No sound of horse hoofs trotting up the road greeted her straining ears. Only the soft thump of the moth's wings on the ceiling, and the rustle of her mother's sleeve as she flicked faster and faster at her tatting broke the perfect stillness.
Would he never come? The 7.40 had arrived, whistling up the valley. The 8.15 had come and gone. There was still the 9.50.
Muriel returned to her book and glanced mechanically down the page. Why didn't he wire? He had no imagination of what they must be feeling.
She read, "Of late years, I say, an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the North of England, but in eighteen hundred eleven-twelve that affluent rain had not descended: there was no Pastoral Aid, no Additional Curates Society to stretch out a helping hand to worn-out old rectors and incumbents, and give them the wherewithal to pay a vigorous young colleague from Oxford or Cambridge."
Muriel was not interested in curates. She let Shirley fall unheeded on her lap, and sat again listening for the sound of her father's horse along the road or of Connie's footsteps in the bedroom overhead.
The clock ticked stupidly, marking minutes, half-hours, hours; but at Miller's Rise endless years had passed since Mr. Hammond drove away that morning to catch the 10.20 train to Market Burton, and so on to Thraile. Centuries had passed while Mrs. Hammond sat with her tatting, staring into the painted glass fire-screen, and Muriel picked up books and embroidery and the nursing accounts and laid them aside again, and Connie up in her room, with red eyes and swollen, distorted face, passed from defiance to despair, and from despair to bitter comfortless surrender.