The Prisoner

								

square chin, dauntless in strength, the eyes dauntless, too, and hair
all a brown gloss with high lights on it, very free about her forehead.
She was not so tall as Anne, but graciously formed and plumper.
Curiously, they did not seem racially unlike the colonel who, to their
passionate loyalties, was "father" not a line removed. In the delicacy
of his patrician type he might even have been "grandfather", for he
looked older than he was, the worsted prey of circumstance. He had met
trouble that would not be evaded, and if he might be said to have
conquered, it was only from regarding it with a perplexed immobility, so
puzzling was it in a world where honour, he thought, was absolutely
defined and a social crime as inexplicable as it was rending.
And while the three wait to have their outlines thus inadequately
sketched, the hackman waits, too, he of a more persistent hope than his
fellows who have gone heavily rolling away to the stable, it being now
six o'clock and this the last train.
Lydia was a young woman of fervid recognitions. She liked to take a day
and stamp it for her own, to say of this, perhaps: "It was the ninth of
April when we went to Addington, and it was a heavenly day. There was a
clear sky and I could see Farvie's beautiful nose and chin against it
and Anne's feather all out of curl. Dear Anne! dear Farvie! Everything
smelled of dirt, good, honest dirt, not city sculch, and I heard a
robin. Anne heard him, too. I saw her smile." But really what Anne
plucked out of the moment was a blurred feeling of peace. The day was
like a cool, soft cheek, the cheek one kisses with calm affection,
knowing it will not be turned away. It was she who first became aware of
Denny, the hackman, and said to him in her liquid voice that laid bonds
of kind responsiveness:
"Do you know the old Blake house?"
Denny nodded. He was a soft, loosely made man with a stubby moustache
picked out in red and a cheerfully dishevelled air of having been up all
night.
"The folks moved out last week," said he. "You movin' in?"
"Yes," Lydia supplied, knowing her superior capacity over the other two,
for meeting the average man. "We're moving in. Farvie, got the checks?"
Denny accepted the checks and, in a neighbourly fashion, helped the
station master in selecting the trunks, no large task when there was but
a drummer's case besides. He went about this meditatively, inwardly
searching out the way of putting the question that should elicit the
identity of his fares. There was a way, he knew. But they had seated
themselves in the hack, and now explained that if he would take two
trunks along the rest could come with the freight due at least by
to-morrow; and he had driven them through the wide street bordered with
elms and behind them what Addington knew as "house and grounds" before
he thought of a way. It was when he had bumped the trunks into the
empty hall and Lydia was paying him from a smart purse of silver given