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Aunt Sophia, for instance, and that awful time at Easterhaze, and the most terrible of all terrible days when I went to the White Bay, and Nancy King, and and my birthday. I can't talk of these subjects. I will talk of anything else of baby Marjorie, and how pretty she grows; how fond we are of nurse, and of father, and oh!" Pauline burst into a little laugh.
Accordingly she wrote to a landlady she happened to know, and engaged some remarkably nice rooms at Easterhaze on the south coast. Verena and Pauline were told of her plans exactly a week after the birthday. Pauline had been having bad dreams; she had been haunted by many things.
For to Pauline, from the first day she had arrived at Easterhaze, the sea had seemed to cry to her in one incessant, reiterating voice: "Come, wash and be clean. Come, lave yourself in me, and leave your naughtiness and your deceits and your black, black lies behind."
She has come to me to help her." "Why, of course she's bad, father," said Nancy. "Don't you know all that happened? Pauline was nearly drowned at Easterhaze, and they say she hasn't been quite, so to say, right in her head ever since. I have been nearly mad about it."
She liked to walk briskly over the great moors which surround Easterhaze, and to sit there and think, though nobody knew what she was thinking about. Her face now and then looked pathetic, but on the whole it was indifferent. Miss Tredgold was much concerned. She made up her mind. "The seaside is doing the child no good," she thought. "I will take her straight back home.
"No, Miss Penelope, but there is one for your nurse." "It is from Easterhaze," said the child. "Thank you thank you, posty." She snatched the first letter away from the old man and darted away with it. Into the nursery she rushed. "Here it is, nursey. Open it, quick! I am to go; I know I am." Nurse did open the letter.
Penelope hesitated a moment. "You wouldn't say that if you didn't mean me to eat it," she said. "Thank you." She closed her teeth in the delicious fruit and enjoyed herself vastly. In short, by the time Mrs. Hungerford and her curious charge reached Easterhaze it seemed to them both that they had known each other all their days. Miss Tredgold, Verena, and Pauline met the train.
"Why wait for the morning?" she exclaimed. "We are all packed and ready. We can easily get to Easterhaze by a late train to-night." Accordingly, by a late train that evening Miss Tredgold, Verena, and Pauline departed. They drove to Lyndhurst Road, and presently found themselves in a first-class carriage being carried rapidly away.
"You can, madam, when the right time comes; but that is not to-day, and it won't be to-morrow. This is my business now, madam, and you must leave it to me." That very day Farmer King went away with his daughter and Pauline. They went to a small village called Rosestairs, not many miles from Easterhaze.
She left the blind up so that the moon could shine through her small window, and she kept repeating to herself at intervals through the night the words that had haunted her when she was at Easterhaze: "Wash and be clean." It seemed to Pauline that the sea was drawing her. The insistent voice of the sea was becoming absolutely unpleasant.
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