12

A quarter of an hour later Lucy, after tiptoeing down the silent house, opened the drawing-room door, and, after closing it with infinite precaution, passed through into the dark room. Then she turned and locked the door behind her.

The white dimity covers of the heavy, early Victorian furniture by which Mrs. Garlett, the invalid sleeping just above the drawing room, set such store, made luminous patches in the big L-shaped apartment, and somehow added to Lucy Warren’s feeling of nervous unease.

Though the passionate, newly awakened side of her beating heart was burning to hear the tiny tap on the long French window which she knew would herald Guy Cheale’s approach, there was another side of the girl which hated and was deeply ashamed of allowing a meeting with her lover here.

She felt that whom she saw, and even what she did, when out of doors, under the sky, was no one’s business but her own—and perhaps, in a much lesser measure, her mother’s. She would also have felt differently had she and Guy Cheale been able to meet alone in the servants’ hall of the Thatched House. But the drawing room she felt to be ground sacred to Mrs. Garlett, so dear and precious indeed to the mistress of the Thatched House that it was never used now, not even on the rare occasions when Harry Garlett had a friend to dinner. Guy Cheale, however, had discovered that the drawing room, alone of all the ground-floor rooms of the spacious old house, had a French window opening into the garden, and he and Lucy Warren had already met there twice.

As Lucy stood in the dark room, listening intently, her nerves taut, her heart beating, there suddenly swept over her an awful prevision of evil, a sudden realization of her folly in allowing Guy Cheale to wile her heart away. She knew, alas! that he was spoiling her for the only life open to such as she—the life of an honest, commonplace, working man’s wife.

13She remembered to-night with an almost anguished vividness the first time she had ever seen Guy Cheale—last February, on her first “afternoon off” in the month. She had gone home to the Thatched House Farm to help her mother with the new gentleman lodger, and, being a girl of a proud independent nature, she had come prepared to dislike him, the more so that she hated his sister, Mrs. Garlett’s strict, sarcastic young lady housekeeper. And then she had opened the door of the little farmhouse parlour, and seen the big, loosely built fair man who was to be “her fate.”

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