The drizzling rain of the afternoon had stopped, there was a starry sky above her, and though she was not moved by beauty, the influence of the place and hour was soothing and she went slowly, forgetting her troubles, hardly thinking, but letting little plans and hopes—her dress for the Spenser-Smiths’ party, the altering of her hat, a cup of cocoa beside the fire and a few words with Wilfrid before she went to bed—flit in pictures across her mind, and then, at the angle made by the junction of Prince’s and Beresford Roads, she stopped for a dreadful moment before she turned and ran.
Like Ruth, earlier in the day, she was strangling her sobs—and she was happier than Ruth, because she was not pursued by her own disloyalty, but she was also more miserable, because, with what she called Wilfrid’s faithlessness, her world was darkened. The stars had gone out when she saw him a few yards ahead of her, beyond the turning, holding a girl’s hand as though, when she offered it in farewell, he could not let it go. There was no mistaking Wilfrid’s bare head and his slim figure leaning backwards as he held the girl’s hand at arm’s length, to see her better, perhaps, or to draw her to him, and as Ethel ran, she was caught by a greater pain than that of seeing Wilfrid’s alliance with another, though the two were mingled; it was the primitive pain of being undesired by any man and the conviction—acknowledged in the moment’s misery—that no one would ever hold her hand in that half-playful, lingering grasp.
Centuries of loneliness seemed to pass over her before she reached the garden gate and saw, through her blurred eyes, one bulky figure, standing there, changed into two. She rushed past them. She had left Wilfrid, holding a girl’s hand, to find Doris in a young man’s arms, and they had both betrayed her. She sped up the path and banged the door in the face of Doris who was following behind her; she flung open the door of the dining-room and saw Ruth and Miss Mole smiling at each other across the hearthrug and for an instant she stood there before she turned and went stumblingly, noisily, up the stairs to her room.
The sight of her, distraught and angry, remained like a material object in the doorway, and when Hannah looked at Ruth she saw that her face was white.
“Oh, what can have happened now?” she moaned.
Hannah had no answer ready, and a knock at the front door called her to open it. There stood Doris, her head flung up, her meekly virtuous expression changed to one of defiance.
“He’s a steady, respectable young man,” she said, “and if he wasn’t it would be all the same! I’ve as good a right to walk out as anybody else, and more chance than some I could name, and so I’m willing to tell her at her convenience.”
“Bless my soul!” Hannah said mildly, looking the little maid up and down, and what she left out of her voice, she put into that cool glance. “You trot up to bed and I’ll talk to you in the morning,” she said, and Doris went. Hannah twisted her nose in satisfaction. It was a good thing there was someone capable of command in a house inhabited by one young woman who was distraught, another who was defiant, and a child who looked ready to faint.
“Life in the happy Nonconformist home!” she thought. “This would do Mr. Blenkinsop a power of good,” and she stepped outside the door and a few paces down the path, to taste the freshness of the night before she went back to Ruth. She could still see Ethel’s face clearly against the darkness. It was the face of one who ragingly but helplessly had watched murder done, and almost mechanically, but with a grim smile, Hannah cast her eyes about for the corpse.
Something swift and dark curvetted past her feet and, at the same moment, she heard the thick voice of Mr. Samson in its nightly call of “Puss, Puss, Puss!”
“Your cat’s here,” she cried back, and she crossed the grass plot and looked over the dividing hedge of laurel to see Mr. Samson standing where the parrot’s cage had been. “Your cat’s here, in the garden,” she said again.
“That you, Miss Fitt?” he said in a rumble. “Catch her for me, can you?”
“Catch an eel!” Hannah said, making a dart for the kitten who was amused by the clumsiness of these human beings.
“Gently does it,” Mr. Samson advised. “You’ve got a good voice for calling a cat. I’d come and catch her myself, but I might be caught by the Reverend—Ha, ha! Got her? Good! Hand her over. This’ll bring on my bronchitis again, I shouldn’t wonder. Haven’t been outside the house for a week, but I’ve had my eye on you, out of the window. ’Tisn’t much I miss. I’ve seen you running in and out, looking so perky, and off to the chapel on Sunday! Well, when you feel like it, Miss Fitt, just come in and have a talk and a look at my cats.”
“Shall I? Perhaps I will, but I must go back now and look after my little girl.”
“What, the scared one?
