A
great disgust was within her and stopped her speech. She got to her feet.
"Let us go home," she said, and she went very quickly down the hill. When
she came to the house she ran up-stairs to her room, locked the door and
flung herself upon her bed. Walter Hine, her father, their plots and
intrigues, were swept clean from her mind as of no account. Her struggle
for the mastery became unimportant in her thoughts--a folly, a waste. For
what her father had said was true; she cared for Chayne. And what she
herself had said to Chayne when first he came to the House of the Running
Water was no less true. "If I loved, I think nothing else would count at
all except that I loved."
She had judged herself aright. She knew that, as she lay prone upon
her bed, plunged in misery, while the birds called upon the boughs in
the garden and the mill stream filled the room with its leaping music.
In a few minutes a servant knocked upon the door and told her that tea
was ready in the library; but she returned no answer. And in a few
minutes more--or so it seemed, but meanwhile the dusk had come--there
came another knock and she was told that dinner had been served. But
to that message again she returned no answer. The noises of the busy
day ceased in the fields, the birds were hushed upon the branches,
quiet and darkness took and refreshed the world.
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