He stood looking at her with a sort of sullen tenderness.
"You"re not going to worry about what I told you?"
"You didn"t tell me. I knew."
"Then----"
But she persisted.
"No. I shall be all right," she said. "There"s a moon."
In the end he let her have her way.
Moon or no moon he saw that it was not his moment.
x.x.xVII
What Gwenda had to do she did quickly.
She wrote to the third Mrs. Cartaret that night. She told her nothing except that she wanted to get something to do in London and to get it as soon as possible, and she asked her stepmother if she could put her up for a week or two until she got it. And would Mummy mind wiring Yes or No on Sat.u.r.day morning?
It was then Thursday night.
She slipped out into the village about midnight to post the letter, though she knew that it couldn"t go one minute before three o"clock on Friday afternoon.
She had no conscious fear that her will would fail her, but her instinct was appeased by action.
On Sat.u.r.day morning Mrs. Cartaret wired: "Delighted. Expect you Friday. Mummy."
Five intolerable days. They were not more intolerable than the days that would come after, when the thing she was doing would be every bit as hard. Only her instinct was afraid of something happening within those five days that would make the hard thing harder.
On Sunday Mrs. Cartaret"s letter came. Her house, she said, was crammed with fiends till Friday. There was a beast of a woman in Gwenda"s room who simply wouldn"t go. But on Friday Gwenda"s room would be ready. It had been waiting for her all the time. Hadn"t they settled it that Gwenda was to come and live with her if things became impossible at home? Robina supposed they _were_ impossible? She sent her love to Alice and Mary, and she was always Gwenda"s loving Mummy.
And she enclosed a five-pound note; for she was a generous soul.
On Monday Gwenda told Peac.o.c.k the carrier to bring her a Bradshaw from Reyburn.
She then considered how she was to account to her family for her departure.
She decided that she would tell Mary first. And she might as well tell her the truth while she was about it, since, if she didn"t, Mary would be sure to find it out. She was sweet and good. Not so sweet and good that she couldn"t hold her own against Papa if she was driven to it, but sweet enough and good enough to stand by Ally and to see her through.
It would be easy for Mary. It wasn"t as if she had ever even begun to care for Rowcliffe. It wasn"t as if Rowcliffe had ever cared for her.
And she could be trusted. A secret was always safe with Mary. She was positively uncanny in her silence, and quite superhumanly discreet.
Mary, then, should be told the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Her father should be told as much of it as he was likely to believe.
Ally, of course, mustn"t have an inkling.
Mary herself had an inkling already when she appeared that evening in the attic where Gwenda was packing a trunk. She had a new Bradshaw in her hand.
"Peac.o.c.k gave me this," said Mary. "He said you ordered it."
"So I did," said Gwenda.
"What on earth for?"
"To look up trains in."
"Why--is anybody coming?"
"Does anybody _ever_ come?"
Mary"s face admitted her absurdity.
"Then"--she made it out almost with difficulty--"somebody must be going away."
"How clever you are. Somebody _is_ going away."
Mary twisted her brows in her perplexity. She was evidently thinking things.
"Do you mean--Steven Rowcliffe?"
"No, dear lamb." (What on earth had put Steven Rowcliffe into Mary"s head?) "It"s not as bad as all that. It"s only a woman. In fact, it"s only me."
Mary"s face emptied itself of all expression; it became a blank screen suddenly put up before the disarray of hurrying, eager things, unclothed and unexpressed.
"I"m going to stay with Mummy."
Gwenda closed the lid of the trunk and sat on it.
(Perturbation was now in Mary"s face.)
"You can"t, Gwenda. Papa"ll never let you go."
"He can"t stop me."
"What on earth are you going for?"
"Not for my own amus.e.m.e.nt, though it sounds amusing."
"Does Mummy want you?"