t he had come for, she had always known. She had no
certain knowledge of her own mind; but she knew that all these weeks she
had been between his influence and her father's, listening to them,
as it were, pleading with her. And, curiously, the pleading of each,
instead of drawing her towards the pleader, had seemed dragging her away
from him, driving her into the arms of the other. To the protection of
one or the other she felt she must go; and it humiliated her to think
that in all the world there was no other place for her. The wildness of
that one night in the old Abbey seemed to have power to govern all her
life to come. Why should that one night, that one act, have this uncanny
power to drive her this way or that, to those arms or these? Must she,
because of it, always need protection? Standing there in the dark it was
almost as if they had come up behind her, with their pleadings; and a
shiver ran down her back. She longed to turn on them, and cry out: "Go
away; oh; go away! I don't want either of you; I just want to be left
alone!" Then something, a moth perhaps, touched her neck. She gasped and
shook herself. How silly!

She heard the back door round the corner of the house opening; a man's
low voice down in the dark said:

"Who's the young lady that comes out in the fields?"

Another voice--one of the maids--answered:

"The Missis's sister."

"They say she's got a baby."

"Never you mind what she's got."

Noel heard the man's laugh. It seemed to her the most odious laugh she
had ever heard. She thought swiftly and absurdly: 'I'll get away from
all this.' The window was only a few feet up. She got out on to the
ledge, let herself down, and dropped. There was a flower-bed below,
quite soft, with a scent of geranium-leaves and earth. She brushed
herself, and went tiptoeing across the gravel and the little front lawn,
to the gate. The house was quite dark, quite silent. She walked on, down
the road. 'Jolly!' she thought. 'Night after night we sleep, and never
see the nights: sleep until we're called, and never see anything. If
they want to catch me they'll have to run.' And she began running down
the road in her evening frock and shoes, with nothing on her head. She
stopped after going perhaps three hundred yards, by the edge of the
wood. It was splendidly dark in there, and she groped her way from trunk
to trunk, with a delicious, half-scared sense of adventure and novelty.
She stopped at last by a thin tr