CHAPTER ONE
"So of course," wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deeper
in the sand, "there was nothing for it but to leave."
Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue ink dissolved
the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes fixed, and tears slowly
filled them. The entire bay quivered; the lighthouse wobbled; and she
had the illusion that the mast of Mr. Connor's little yacht was bending
like a wax candle in the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful
things. She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were regular;
the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread.
"... nothing for it but to leave," she read.
"Well, if Jacob doesn't want to play" (the shadow of Archer, her eldest
son, fell across the notepaper and looked blue on the sand, and she felt
chilly--it was the third of September already), "if Jacob doesn't want
to play"--what a horrid blot! It must be getting late.
"Where IS that tiresome little boy?" she said. "I don't see him. Run and
find him. Tell him to come at once." "... but mercifully," she
scribbled, ignoring the full stop, "everything seems satisfactorily
arranged, packed though we are like herrings in a barrel, and forced to
stand the perambulator which the landlady quite naturally won't
allow...."
Such were Betty Flanders's letters to Captain Barfoot--many-paged,
tear-stained. Scarborough is seven hundred miles from Cornwall: Captain
Barfoot is in Scarborough: Seabrook is dead. Tears made all the dahlias
in her garden undulate in red waves and flashed the glass house in her
eyes, and spangled the kitchen with bright knives, and made Mrs. Jarvis,
the rector's wife, think at church, while the hymn-tune played and Mrs.
Flanders bent low over her little boys' heads, that marriage is a
fortress and widows stray solitary in the open fields, picking up
stones, gleaning a few golden straws, lonely, unprotected, poor
creatures. Mrs. Flanders had been a widow for these two years.
