Part 38 (1/2)

Secrecy is a delicious concomitant of love.” She heard the added, whispered words, uttered as if to his own heart, ”At least so I have ever found it.” And they were words which a little troubled Laura.

Surely she was the first woman he had ever loved?

”Aunt Letty has a right to know,” she murmured. ”But no one else, Oliver, must know, till January is past.” And then she hung her head, perchance a little ashamed of this harking back to the conventions of her everyday life.

He was surprised to hear her say further and with an effort, ”I would rather Lord St. Amant didn't know. We shall be staying at Knowlton Abbey together in December.”

”We shall,” he said exultantly. ”For that I thank G.o.d!”

Then suddenly he released her from out of his strong encompa.s.sing arms, and stooping down very low he kissed the hem of her long black gown....

After they had parted Oliver Tropenell waited on and on in the dark garden till he heard Lord St. Amant's car drive away. Then he walked quickly across the lawn and back into his mother's drawing-room.

”Mother?” he said briefly. ”Laura and I are going to be married. But we do not wish any one to know this till--till February.”

Even now he could not wholly banish G.o.dfrey Pavely's intrusive presence from his Laura-filled heart.

CHAPTER XXIII

To any imaginative mind there is surely something awe-inspiring in the thought of the constant secret interlocking of lives which seem as unlikely ever to meet, in a decisive sense, as are two parallel lines.

How amazed, how bewildered, Laura Pavely would have been could she have visioned even a hundredth part of the feeling concerning herself which filled her nearest neighbour, Katty Winslow's, heart!

Even in the old days Katty had disliked Laura, and had regarded her with a mixture of contempt and envy. And now that Oliver Tropenell had come back--now that Katty suspected him of being Laura's potential, if not actual, lover--she grew to hate the woman who had always been kind to her with an intense, calculating hate.

It seemed as if she hardly ever looked out of one of her windows without seeing Oliver on his way to The Chase, or Laura on her way to Freshley--and this although the secret lovers behaved with great discretion, for Oliver was less, rather than more, with Laura than he used to be in the old days when G.o.dfrey was alive. Also, wherever Laura happened to be, her child--cheerful, eager little Alice--was sure to be close by.

Laura, so much Katty believed herself to have discovered, was now happy, in her cold, unemotional way, in the possession of a man's ardent devotion, while she, Katty, who had asked so comparatively little of life, had been deprived of the one human being who could, and perhaps in time would, have given her all she wanted.

Poor G.o.dfrey Pavely! No one ever spoke of him now, in that neighbourhood where once he had counted for so much. Already it was as if he had never been. But to Katty Winslow he was still an insistent, dominating presence. Often she brooded over his untimely death, and sometimes she upbraided herself for not having made some sort of effort to solve the mystery. The reward was still in being, but one day, lately, when she had made some allusion to it in Laura's presence, Laura, reddening, had observed that she was thinking of withdrawing it.

”Lord St. Amant and the Scotland Yard people never approved of it,” she said, ”and as you know, Katty, it has led to nothing.”

Early in October, Laura, Oliver and Alice, pa.s.sing by Rosedean one day, turned in through the gate. ”Why shouldn't we go in and ask Katty to come to tea?” It was Laura's suggestion. Somehow she was sorry for Katty--increasingly sorry. Yet she could not help feeling glad when Harber coldly informed her that Mrs. Winslow had left home, and would not be back for ten days.

At the very time that happy little group of people was at her door, Katty herself was standing in a queue of people waiting to take her ticket at York station.

Though Mrs. Winslow would have been honestly surprised had any one told her she was sentimental, she had actually come down by an earlier train than was necessary in order that she might retrace the ways that she and her friend had trodden together a year ago in January.

She had first gone to the Minster, moving swiftly along the paved streets where she had walked and talked slowly, pleasantly, with the dead man. Then she had wandered off to the picturesque thoroughfare lined with curiosity shops. How kind, how generous G.o.dfrey had been to her just here! Every time she looked up in her pretty little drawing-room at Rosedean, his gift met her eye.

While she was engaged on this strange, painful pilgrimage, there welled up in Katty's heart a flood of agonised regret and resentment. She told herself bitterly that G.o.dfrey's death had aged her--taken the spring out of her. Small wonder indeed that in these last few weeks she should have come to hate Laura with a steady, burning flame of hate....

So it was that Katty Winslow was in a queer mental and physical state when she returned to the big railway station to complete her journey.

She did not feel at all in the mood to face the gay little houseparty where she was sure of an uproarious, as well as of an affectionate, welcome.

As she stood in the queue of rather rough North-country folk, waiting to take her third-cla.s.s ticket, there swept over her a sudden, vivid recollection of that incident--the hearing of a voice which at the time had seemed so oddly familiar--which had happened on the day she had parted from G.o.dfrey Pavely for the last time.

And then--as in a blinding, yet illuminating flash--there came to her the conviction, nay, more, the certain knowledge, as to whose voice it had been that she had heard on the last occasion when she had stood there, in the large, bare booking office. The voice she had heard--she was quite, _quite_ sure of it now, it admitted of no doubt in her mind at all--had been the peculiar, rather high-pitched, voice of Gillie Baynton....