Chapter XXXVI: “The glad, sad, tranquil, passionate human heart.”

WILLIAM WATSON.

Of course Katherine was startled and at first almost angry at her friend’s decision. It is so difficult not to be angry when one is startled, but it was her custom always to take the common-sense version.

The work was telling on Daphne, Overham had always suited her, and it was very, very much better for Philip. Daphne had been making things very hard for Philip. Katherine had spoken to her quite frankly about it. “I do not care for Philip,” she said, “as I thought I did, but I do not like to watch him being played with, I like him a great deal too much for that.” And Daphne had said, that she wasn’t playing with him, and that she thought Katherine was very unkind, and that she was going to evensong. But even though Katherine took all these things into consideration, her heart ached at the thought of her own loneliness. She would be quite cut off from the rest of the world, only a part of a great machine, and to be a part of a great machine is very cruel. Then there was Bert Russell.

The hours off which had been started in the quiet little A. B. C. had been carried on by the side of the Thames, and in many city wanderings.

The American knew London better than many who were born and bred in her. He had explored, visited and wandered into all unlikely places. At night he had passed out into the life of the streets, North, South, East and West, and he had seen and heard strange and surprising things. To Katherine he revealed only the fascinating side of them. During their holiday hours he never attempted to make love to her, but he had made himself indispensable. When she looked out into the future, it was he who made that indescribable difference between a blank out-look, and a bracing cheerfulness. She did not consciously count him in, but it had become impossible for her to count him out. Daphne’s going would mean that he might become more to her, and Katherine knew this would not do at all, he was quite enough to her already. Daphne herself felt leaving the hospital more than she had thought possible. She was shutting herself out of a world that has a fascination greater than its hardships. It is terrible to give up possibilities, for experience has laid no dark restraining hand upon their hopefulness.

“Oh, Katherine!” said Daphne their last evening, “I do not want to say good-bye.” Katherine looked at her steadily.

“You have not told me yet,” she said, “why you are going to say it.”

“Because,” said Daphne, “I should never have come here, I should have stayed with my uncle. It has been a mistake, a beautiful mistake, for I have been very happy here, but that was not right either, now I must go back. Oh, why is one always going back?” Katherine never understood why Daphne should sorrow over abstract things. She felt herself so very unhappy at losing her friend, that she could not argue, nor did she wish to explain.

“I shall—miss you!” she said. So the next morning Daphne disappeared.

If she had expected to find Overham changed, because she had, she was disappointed.

Her aunt was managing a Sunday school treat in the Vicarage field. She kissed Daphne when she came in (after handing the last bun to the last child) and told her how many pounds of cake were left over from the treat. It would keep, she explained, until next week when there was to be a choir tea. Her uncle said very little, she thought he was looking a great deal older, and she was a little disappointed that he entirely overlooked her spiritual trials. She had come there to be made good, and for the first few weeks she expected to see dramatic signs of it, but she found it very difficult to keep her temper with her aunt. By-and-bye the first dismal feeling of unwontedness wore off, there appeared many little things that she could do, she arranged the flowers, did the church vases, and ran errands for her aunt. She had asked her uncle if she might take a district to visit, but he had evaded her request, and she was too proud to ask him again. In the autumn he suggested that she should start an evening club for the village boys, and she jumped at the opening. At first it was very hard, they were extremely shy, red and awkward, and had horribly large hands, but in the course of a few weeks they grew to like the pleasant parish room with its wood fire, and tables covered with games, books and papers, and the sight of “Miss Daphne,” who was always smiling and willing, and to whom they gave a surprising deference and affection.

Daphne grew humble, with a keen sense of how little she was doing to deserve so much.

The club grew and she started a Sunday Bible Class in connection with it. Her letters to Katherine grew full of daily difficulties and surprises in her new work. It _was_ surprising, and at first very much a system of working in the dark.

“One gets,” Daphne wrote, “very disconcerted about what may be going on in their minds, but, by-and-bye, one understands that it is more probably nothing at all, than anything so very terrible. Of course they are quite inarticulate. If there is anything they don’t like, they won’t tell you, you have to feel it in the air, and then suggest to them all the things it may be until an increase of vacancy in their faces, tells you that you have found the stumbling block, and by the time you have found it, it is quite possible that they may have got so used to it, that they will object to its departure, and you will have to bring it back again. You may get angry sometimes, but you must be good-humoured after it, and you must always be fair. In all these things one finds that it is merely character that tells. What you _are_ strikes through all that you say, and if you talk beautifully and it does not come out of your heart, they don’t listen. It is tremendously good for one not to be listened to, it makes one so careful what one says.”

Days passed into weeks, and then into months, until one day Katherine became a staff-nurse, and Daphne found she had been back in Overham a year.

Routine puts wings to time, and it is really only events that interfere with the flight of it. Overham was now, to Daphne, a large and exciting centre of existence. She had forgotten all about dullness and grey hairs. She had not, however, forgotten all about Arthur, nor had the sting of Reggie’s sudden truthfulness passed out of her life; but these things she had buried, and though they sometimes called to her that she had not buried them deep enough, she put it down to the cry of a girl’s heart for love and recognition. And after all, the cry and the ache only came to her sometimes, when she was alone in the garden on summer nights, or as she struggled home on autumn evenings when the wind was high, and the spirit of passing things called out upon her youth and loneliness. When she felt these moods she would go and play to her uncle, and he would watch her a little wistfully.