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Updated: June 29, 2025
Therefore I hope very sincerely that these reports which I am now going to read will enable me to go boldly to Harold Hazlewood and say: 'Stella Ballantyne is as guiltless of this crime as you or I." Mr. Pettifer took up the big envelope which he had placed on the table beside him and carried it away to his study. On the Saturday morning Mr. Hazlewood drove over early to Great Beeding.
She ran over in her mind the days of this last month since he had come to the inn at Great Beeding and friends of her family had written to her parents of his coming. "It's the most perfect of all your days here. I am glad. I want you to carry back with you good memories of our Sussex." "I shall do that," said he, "but for another reason." Stella pushed on a foot or two ahead of him.
She rode back with her dreams in tatters and a sort of incredulity that to her too, as to other girls, all this pain had come. They came to a bridle-path which led downwards through a thicket of trees to the weald and so descended upon Great Beeding.
"I shall dine at Little Beeding on Friday," he said, "because Harold always gives me an admirable glass of vintage port"; and with that he dismissed the subject. Mrs. Pettifer was content to let it smoulder in his mind.
My lips shook so, I never could speak the words." Then her voice ran up into a laugh. "To think of your living in a house with somebody else! Oh no!" "You need have no fear of that, Stella." They were in the garden of Little Beeding and they walked across the meadow towards her cottage, talking very earnestly. Mr. Hazlewood was watching them secretly from the window of the library.
And to think he's got that beautiful house! Do you know there's hardly a pheasant on the place. And I've hashed them down out of the sky in the old days there by the dozen. Well, he's got a son in the Coldstream, Dick Hazlewood, who's not so bad. But Harold! Oh, pass me the port!" Harold indeed had inherited Little Beeding by an accident during the first summer after Stella had gone out to India.
Hazelwood, busy though he made himself out to be, found time that evening to drive in his motor-car into Great Beeding, and when the London train pulled up at the station he was on the platform. He looked anxiously at the passengers who descended until he saw Robert Pettifer. He went up to him at once. "What in the world are you doing here?" asked the lawyer.
In the quiet country town obvious changes had taken place during the eight years of Stella's absence. They were not changes of importance, however, and one sentence can symbolize them all there was now tarmac upon its roads. But in the cluster of houses a mile away at the end of the deep lane the case was different. Mr. Harold Hazlewood had come to Little Beeding.
Dick Hazlewood only laughed at the constraint of his acquaintances, and when three of them crossed the road hurriedly in Great Beeding to avoid Stella and himself he said good-humouredly: "They are like an ill-trained company of bad soldiers. Let one of them break from the ranks and they'll all stream away so as not to be left behind. You'll see, Stella.
Chubble grunted and turned the speech suspiciously over in his mind. Was Dick poking fun at him or at his father? "That's bookish," he said. "I am afraid it is," Dick Hazlewood agreed humbly. "The fact is I am now an Instructor at the Staff College and much is expected of me." They had reached the gate of Little Beeding House. It was summer time.
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