She placed the milk on the table, set out the bread and soaked
pilchards, found what was left of the cheese, and went hastily forth
lest her aunt should stay her.
She was bound for the little wood that lay in a fold of the moorland
above the sea. This wood was to her what a City of Refuge was to the
Hebrews of the Old Testament, and, like them, she fled to it when the
world's opinion of what was fit had proved at variance with her own.
To-night she went to it not for sanctuary from others, but to commune
with herself--in truth, for the first time she went not because of what
she had left but because of what she would find. Her bare heels were
winged along the road.
The wood lay lapped in the shadow that the western ridge had cast on it
an hour earlier than the rest of the world's bedtime, ever since the
trees had been there to receive the chill caress, and that was for many
a hundred years. Old Madgy swore that even in her young day the small
folk had still held their revels on the mossy slopes amongst the fanlike
roots, and who knows what larger folk had not fled there to wanton more
sweetly than in close cottages, or, like Loveday, to play the more
easily with their thoughts? The wood alone knew, and it held its
memories as closely as it held the thousand tiny lives confided to its
care; the bright-eyed shrew-mice that poked quivering noses through the
litter of last year's leaves, the birds that nested behind the
clustering twigs, the slow-worms that slipped along its grassy ditches.
Pages:
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35