Jasper went to the window. Below, in a narrow walled garden full of lavender bushes and wet washing, a crowd of little girls in pinafores had surrounded his sister and were all talking together. He watched her bend down to listen to the smallest of them — a fat child of six or seven, with a ribbon coming out of her hair — and nod gravely, and retie the ribbon. Then she straightened, and turned her back on them all, and put her face to the garden wall, and the children shrieked with delight and began creeping toward her across the grass.
*Grandmother's Footsteps.* They had played it at Kelmscott, on the long lawn below the terrace, when she was six and he was twelve and their mother was still alive. She had always been the best at it. She could hear you breathe.
"Your Grace," said Miss Penhallow quietly behind him.
"I know," he said. "We're going."
But he stood there a moment longer, and watched.
V
Imogen was right about the horse. The chestnut went dead lame on the long hill above Easton, and Saltash left it in a ditch and set off across the fields on foot toward the Bristol road, and at a quarter to four in the afternoon he walked straight into Aldous Thrale, two of Sir Walter Hensleigh's keepers, and Sir Walter Hensleigh himself, who had heard the whole story in his library at Coombe with his eyebrows climbing steadily toward his wig and had then called for his horse, his hat, and his gamekeepers, in that order. Saltash did not resist. He was, Thrale reported afterward, extremely civil about it. He said there had been a misunderstanding and that he looked forward to clearing it up. He asked whether there would be any objection to his sending for his attorney, and whether he might have his supper at the Swan rather than in the lock-up, since he was, after all, a gentleman of property.
Sir Walter said there would be every objection, and put him in the lock-up.
Jasper heard all this at nine o'clock that night, in a private parlour at the Swan in Wells, where he had taken rooms because there was nowhere else to go. Thrale told it well. He was tired and muddy and very pleased with himself, and Jasper let him tell it twice, and poured him a second glass of the landlord's surprisingly good claret, and listened to none of it.
Miss Penhallow was in the room across the passage. She had not gone back to Bristol. Her uncle had arrived at the Swan at six, in the hired chaise from Chalcott, and there had been a scene in the yard which Jasper had witnessed from the parlour window and which half of Wells had witnessed from the street. Mr. Josias Penhallow had said a great many things at the top of his voice about ingratitude, and ruin, and the notes, and what was to become of them all now that she had driven Mr. Saltash to the lock-up with her lies. Miss Penhallow had stood on the inn step in her grey silk wedding pelisse with her arms folded and let him say all of it. When he had finished, she had said, quite clearly, "They aren't lies, Uncle, and you know they aren't. Go home and tell Aunt Clemency I'm well. I'll write." And she had turned round and walked back into the inn, and her uncle had stood in the yard for a moment with his mouth open, and then got back into the chaise.
"You'll have to do something about her," said Thrale, following his eyes to the door.
"About Miss Penhallow?"