"I hope it isn't a hint I need washing," he said with mock seriousness.

"I thought you liked oatmeal soap!" protested Gwen, nearly crying.

"So I do, my dear; and I haven't had any for a long time. Like the man in Pears's advertis.e.m.e.nt, I shall now use no other."

"Here's the postman!" shouted Giles, rushing excitedly to the door, where that much-burdened official, with an extra man to help him, was sorting out what belonged to the Parsonage.

"Six letters for you, Gwen, and two parcels," said Beatrice, a.s.suming command of the correspondence, and distributing it among the eager family.

Gwen s.n.a.t.c.hed her share nervously. Would any of the letters contain the longed-for postal orders? No, they all had halfpenny stamps, and were clearly only Christmas cards.

Then she fell upon the parcels. The first contained a handsome knitted coat, and cap to match, "with love from Grannie", and the second, a beautiful little set of Wordsworth's poems in a cloth case, "with Aunt Violet's best wishes".

Gwen sat down on the sofa, feeling as if she had received a rude shock. That both Grannie and Aunt Violet should have sent presents instead of money was worse than she had calculated upon. She tried to pull herself together, and not show her disappointment too plainly, but the thought of what she owed was paramount. It only made it worse that the gifts were really acceptable, and that the rest of the family persisted in considering her extremely lucky.

"It was kind of Grannie to send that lovely coat: dark green will just suit you. Try it on, and the cap too," said Winnie.

"It looks sw.a.n.k!" declared the boys.

"They'll go with your dark green skirt," affirmed Beatrice.

"The Wordsworths are scrumptious!" said Lesbia. "You've done awfully well this Christmas!"

"Yes, but how am I going to pay my debts?" thought Gwen, as she ran upstairs to get ready for church.

CHAPTER X

A Prodigal

As the next term seemed likely to bring its own crop of troubles, Gwen, with a kind of grim philosophy, determined to enjoy herself while she could, and make the most of the holidays. She helped vigorously at the schools, where tea parties for children and grownups, concerts and other entertainments were in full swing, and she even wrung a few words of appreciation from Beatrice for her active services in the way of slicing up cake, cutting ham sandwiches, and pouring out innumerable cups of tea. Gwen liked the village festivities, she knew everybody in the place, and found it all fun, from listening to the comic songs of the local grocer, to playing Oranges and Lemons with the babies in the Infant School.

"We've three real parties too," she said on December 30th, "as well as going to the Chambers' this afternoon."

"I hardly think Mrs. Chambers will expect you," declared Beatrice, looking out of the window at the dark sky. "It's beginning to snow already, and I believe we shall have a heavy fall."

"Then it must keep off till to-morrow, for we've got to get to North Ditton somehow!" announced Gwen.

d.i.c.k's mother had asked the younger Gascoynes to tea, and amongst their various invitations it was to this that Gwen looked forward the most. She wanted to see d.i.c.k's home, and the collection of birds' eggs and b.u.t.terflies which he had promised to show her, and his magic lantern, and his microscope, and all the Natural History books of which he had so often spoken. She watched the weather impatiently, and when the snow fell faster and faster, and Beatrice decided emphatically that the visit was impossible, she broke into open mutiny.

"It's too bad! We shouldn't take any harm. What an old mollycoddle you are, Beatrice!"

"I've a little more sense in my head than you have! With this wind the roads will be deep in drifts. It's quite unfit to go out, especially for you with that nasty cough. I should have you laid up with bronchitis."

"My cold's better," affirmed Gwen, trying not to sound hoa.r.s.e; "snow doesn't hurt people. Father's gone out in it!"

"Father was obliged to go--it's quite a different thing for him. I'm sorry you're disappointed, but really, Gwen, don't be so childish!

Look at Lesbia, she isn't making such a dreadful fuss!"

"Lesbia never worries about anything, so it's no virtue at all!"

snarled Gwen, knowing perfectly well that she was unfair, for Lesbia undoubtedly added self-control to her naturally sweet disposition.

"You always hold up Lesbia! You've no right to say we must stop at home, just because you're the eldest!"

Beatrice sighed. Sometimes she thought this turbulent cuckoo of a younger sister was the cross of her life.

"It's no use talking in this way, Gwen! Somebody must be in authority, and you'll have to do as you're told."

"I shan't! I don't care! You're only six years older than I am!"

And Gwen flounced out of the room in a rage. She ran upstairs, her eyes smarting with hot tears of temper. She was disgusted with the others for not taking the matter more to heart. How could Lesbia sit reading so calmly, or the boys amuse themselves with their absurd engine?

"They don't care like I do! I wish I could go without them!" she said aloud.

The idea was an excellent one. What fun it would be to go alone, and have d.i.c.k all to herself--no tiresome youngsters to claim his attention, finger his books, and perhaps break his birds' eggs; not even Lesbia to ask stupid questions about things any ordinary person ought to know. She could easily tell Mrs. Chambers that her sister had thought it too stormy for the little ones to venture, and probably Dr.

Chambers would drive her back in the gig.

"After all, Father never told me not to go!" she thought, "and Beatrice is getting a perfect tyrant; I can't be expected to obey her as if I were an infant. A girl in the Fifth is quite old enough to decide things for herself, especially when she's as tall as I am!"

Gwen changed her dress, put on her best hair ribbon, her brooch, and her locket, then peeped cautiously down the stairs. Although she felt full of self-a.s.sertion, she had no wish to risk a further encounter with Beatrice. All seemed quiet, so, donning hat and coat, she crept to the cupboard where mackintoshes and galoshes were kept, and armed herself to defy the weather. It was quite an easy matter to slip out by the back door, and in less than ten seconds she was hurrying through the village, chuckling at her own daring and cleverness. Thick flakes were whirling everywhere: when she looked upwards they showed as little dark patches against the neutral-tinted sky, but when they pa.s.sed the line of vision, each soft lump of crystals gleamed purest white as it joined the ever-deepening ma.s.s below. Every gate and stump and rubbish heap was a thing of beauty, glorified by the ethereal covering of the snow; the dead clumps of ragwort by the road side, the withered branches of oak, the shrivelled trails of bramble all seemed transformed by the feathery particles into a species of fairyland.

As Gwen left the village, and took the path that led across the moor, she seemed to walk into a cloud of whiteness that enclosed her and shut her out from all before or behind. She stood still for a moment, and drew in her breath with a sense of intense exhilaration. She was all by herself in the midst of this new-found world of snow, and the very solitude had a fascination. It is good sometimes for the spirit to be alone; strange vague thoughts, half memories, half imaginings, fill the brain like a full high tide; strong impressions, unfelt and unknowable in the distraction of human company, force themselves silently yet persistently upon us; the corporal and the tangible lose their hard outlines and begin to merge into the in visible--in such moments the soul grows. It is perhaps one of the disadvantages of a large family that the members are apt to lack what one might call spiritual elbow room, the constant close companionship, the fridging and rubbing of the continual, daily, hourly intercourse, though an excellent discipline for the temper, leaves scant opportunity for the development of the individuality. Gwen could not have explained this in the least, but as she stood in the still quiet of the falling snow, she felt as if all the little fretting cares and worries and squabbles and anxieties dropped away into a subordinate place, and she were viewing life with another range of vision, where the proportions of things were quite changed.

She walked on, almost as if she were in a dream, without even the sound of a footstep to break the intense silence. She was now on the open wold, where there were neither hedges nor walls, but only a few stones to mark the road from the sedgy, heathery expanse of moor that stretched on either side. Gwen knew the way so thoroughly that she thought she could have followed it blindfold. Every rock and boulder and bush were familiar, and as a rule were so many points along the daily path to school. Now, however, all the well-known landmarks seemed to have a strange similarity, and to be merging into one great white waste, in which tree stump was indistinguishable from stone or gorse clump. The light was fading rapidly, for the clouds went on gathering, and the flakes came down ever thicker and faster. So far Gwen had gone on with the utmost confidence, but now she stopped and entertained a doubt. She did not recognize the boulder on her right, and the juniper bush on her left was surely strange.

"I verily believe I've come wrong somehow," she muttered. "There's nothing for it but to turn back."

She could see her own footsteps in the snow behind, and for some hundreds of yards she traced them; then they began to get fainter and fainter, and presently they were hidden entirely by the new-fallen flakes. The road was completely obliterated, there was nothing round her but shapeless indefinite whiteness. Then it dawned upon Gwen's soul that she was lost, lost hopelessly on the bare wold, where she might wander for miles without seeing the gleam of a farmhouse window or hearing even the bark of a shepherd's dog. The solitude that before had seemed so inspiring, suddenly became oppressive loneliness. What was she to do? Tramp on and on, perhaps in a circle, till she could go no farther? Already it was heavy walking, and under the rocks and bushes the drifts were deepening. Yet it would never do to sit down in the snow. Tired as she was, she must keep moving, and while the faintest gleam of daylight lasted she must try and find some guide-post to civilization.

"I wish I'd brought Jingles. I never thought of him," she sighed, longing regretfully for the s.h.a.ggy Irish terrier that acted watchdog at the Parsonage. "I wonder how soon they'll miss me at home? Not till tea-time, I expect, and then they'll probably think I'm at the Chambers'. Beatrice would guess where I'd gone. How furiously angry she'll be!"

For the first time a little awkward uncomfortable inward suggestion began to croak that elder sisters are occasionally right, and may even be wiser in their generation than tall girls who have entered the Fifth. Gwen's cough, which had been hacking all day, came on much worse, and began to hurt her chest: she wished she had brought her _thick_ m.u.f.fler. It was a subject of perennial dispute between herself and Beatrice, and she often discarded it simply because the latter told her to put it on. She hated to appear mollycoddlish, and sometimes indeed did very silly things out of sheer foolhardiness. At present she was bitterly cold. The snow had sifted inside her galoshes, and made her feet wet, and the chilly wind was creeping down her neck and up her sleeves, and whirling frozen flakes at her face.

No cheery tea in the Chambers' drawing-room, and no delightful chat with d.i.c.k afterwards about photography and magic lanterns.

"The fact of the matter is that I've been an idiot!" she confessed to herself. "Anybody with an ounce of sense would have known it was too snowy to cross the wold. I ought to have gone round by the high road.

I seemed to turn across here just out of habit."

Gwen could not tell how long she stumbled about. It felt like interminable hours as she wearily dragged herself along, watching the sky grow darker, and the landscape more and more blurred, till she could scarcely distinguish which was snow and which was sky. At last her aching limbs absolutely refused to carry her any farther, and she crouched under the shelter of a big juniper bush that overhung a piece of rock. Here at least she was out of the biting, freezing wind. The comparative warmth made her feel sleepy. She roused herself with an effort. To sleep in the snow, she knew, was fatal, so she fell to rubbing her hands and feet to try and restore the circulation. All at once she started up and shouted aloud.

In the distance she had heard a short, sharp yelp, and she reasoned that where there was a dog, a man might possibly be following. Again and again she called, till, to her intense relief, a "Hallo!" came in answer, and she made out a snowy form moving in her direction. The dog found her first; it bounded at her, whining and sniffing at her skirts, then rushed away barking loudly to inform its master of her whereabouts.

"Can you tell me where I am? I've got lost!" cried Gwen, wading through a drift in her eagerness to meet her rescuer.

"Why, you're close to our house--Rawlins' farm. Who is it? I can't see in the dark. Miss Gascoyne? Why, whatever are you doing here all alone?"

He might well ask, Gwen thought, but she ignored the question. She knew the man, for he was a parishioner, and two of his boys sang in the choir at church.