with any last walk. She would never forget that garden, or any corner of it. And once she had put her rooms straight after her trunks had gone she was frantic to get away from it, and come to some peace of mind, if she ever would again.
It was with dry eyes, but with a heart of lead, that she walked out in the early evening, trying not to think of the glorious day when she had first walked in.
She did not go straight into the town. She went round the back of it out on the flat to the coast road, and by a track she knew well to the cliffs. There in the dusk she managed to eat a sandwich, and there she stayed soothed till late at night. Then she went back to the town, and to the steamer, and astonished the steward at midnight by demanding the whole of the small ladies’ cabin of four berths all to herself for the trip the next day. She got it because she paid for it. And there she stayed alone till the little steamer chugged into Helensville. She revived a little in the train, and looked at things out of the window as if she knew them for what they were.
She had not told her father she was coming. She had sent no word to anyone. She wanted to land in the city alone, to go to a hotel alone, to stay alone for a day or two, till the life and movement about her should help her to put out of mind the picture that haunted her, the picture of Dane in the garden alone. But even before she reached the first suburban station the sense of forward movement began to stir within her, a vague exciting sense of the adventure that might come with a to-morrow, and she saw that already she was beginning again.
VII
Dane wrote the letter to Valerie the night he dined
