n have been of remorse. She looked, I thought, as though she were
sorry for me.
She was gone before I could speak again.
* * * * *
I found my way out by the back door through which Jervaise and I had
entered all those incalculable hours ago; and I looked up at the window
from which Anne's beautiful voice had hailed me out of the night. I wanted
to think about her, to recall how she had looked and spoken--at that
window; in the course of her talk with Frank Jervaise; in the recent scene
in the farm sitting-room when she had ambushed herself so persistently
behind the ear of the settle; and, most of all, I desired to weigh every
tone and expression I could remember in that last long conversation of
ours; every least gesture or attention that might give me a hope of having
won, in some degree, her regard or interest.
But the perplexing initiative of my intelligence would not, for some
reason, permit me to concentrate my thoughts on her at that moment. My
mind was bewilderingly full of Anne, but I could not think of her. When I
fell into the pose of gazing up at her window, the association suggested
not the memory I desired, but the picture of Frank Jervaise fumbling in
the darkness of the porch, and the excruciating anguish of Racquet's bark.
From that I fell to wondering why I had not seen Racquet on this occasion
of my second visit? I had not remembered him until then.
I pulled myself up with an effort, and finding the surroundings of the
yard so ineffectual as a stimulus, I wandered down the hill towards the
wood. I suggested to myself that I might meet Banks returning from the
Hall, but my chief hope was that I might revive the romance of the night.
The sun was setting clear and red, a different portent from the veiled
thing that had finally hidden itself in a huddle of purple and gray cloud
the night before. I had seen it from my bedroom at the Hall as I dressed
for dinner and had mildly regretted the threat of possible bad weather. I
had been a little bored by the anticipations I had formed of my week-end.
The Jervaises, from what I had seen of them, promised, I thought, to be
uncommonly dull. I had not seen Brenda before dinner.
I roused myself again and made an effort to shift the depression that was
settling upon me, but the mood was not to be exorcised by any deliberate
attempt to revive the glow of adventure that had warmed my earlier
excursions through the wood. The v
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