Capricious Caroline

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

As the large motor swung along with the easy velocity and assurance of some enormous bird, Camilla Lancing nestled more cosily into the warmth of her fur wraps.

Rupert Haverford was driving, and he looked back every now and then to see if his guest was comfortable.

"Is this too quick for you?" he asked once; and Mrs. Lancing only shook her head with a smile.

"It is too delightful," she answered.

The little town where they had been lunching lay far, far away in the distance now, its ugliness softened by the mingling of sun and haze, and the country through which they were passing was very open; in a degree bleak. On one hand marshland and rough common ground, and on the other the beach inland, then stretches of wet sand, and then the restless, murmuring sea, bearing on its shimmering surface the cold embrace of the setting November sun.

Mrs. Lancing sighed involuntarily as she looked dreamily away to where the sky and sea seemed to meet, but her sigh was an unconscious tribute to the graciousness of the circumstances in which she found herself.

The smooth swinging movement of the car fascinated her. As she now and then closed her eyes, she felt as if she were being carried away from all that constituted life to her at other times; from excitement and pleasure and anxiety, from sordid and obtrusive care; even from the fever of hope and the illusive charm of chance. It was a delightful sensation.

Sometimes as the road curved the car seemed almost to approach the water, and the white-crested waves broke within a few yards of it with a boom; the rushing of the incoming and receding water making a musical accompaniment to the humming sound of the motor. Then they passed from the coastline, and the road began to wind upwards. The sea was shut from view by a wall of chalky hillocks covered with stubbly grass, and only the country outlook remained.

Just before, for a brief while, the world had worn a soft, an almost rosy tint; but as the sun vanished this warmth went also, and now the landscape stretched into the distance grey, unsympathetic, and monotonous.

The speed of the car lessened as the ascent grew steeper; a thin mist began to gather ahead of them. To Mrs. Lancing's imaginative eye this mist took the form of a flock of fleecy white birds just hovering before winging flight.

Haverford pulled up here and, relinquishing his place to the chauffeur, climbed into the body of the car.

"Are you very cold?" he asked anxiously; "do you know, I am very much afraid, Mrs. Lancing, that this road will put us back an hour or so. It was foolish of me to come this way, for the country is new to me, and the road is certainly about the worst we have struck lately."

He occupied himself in tucking the big fur rug more securely about his guest, despite her protestations that she was quite warm enough, and quite comfortable.

The road was certainly very bad, and though the car disposed of the rough ground with an air of superb indifference, a certain amount of jolting was inevitable....