The lonely house

Lily Fairfield seemed to be rushing along a dark tunnel. It was as if she were being borne on wings. A keen, delicately perfumed air was blowing in her face. Far ahead of her there was a pin-point gleam of bright light—that surely must be the end of the tunnel? But as she swept on and on, farther and farther, the gleam did not grow larger or brighter. It seemed to remain, a white fixed star of light, infinitely far away.

Though the experience was intensely vivid, in a sense the girl was conscious that she was experiencing one of the strange, curious dreams, not wholly unpleasant, though sometimes verging on nightmare, which had haunted her at certain intervals during the whole of her not very long life.

With dreadful suddenness, out of the dark void above there leapt on her a huge black and white cat. She could see its phosphorescent eyes glaring at her in the darkness; she could feel its stifling weight on her breast.

She awoke with a strangled cry—to realise that the nightmare cat had materialised from a book which had fallen out of the net-rack of the swaying French railway carriage in which she was traveling!

She looked round her, still a little dazed by her strange dream. And then she grew very pink, for the only other two occupants of the railway carriage were smiling at her broadly.

There was unveiled admiration and eager interest in the face of the older man, a middle-aged Frenchman named Hercules Popeau, and a kind of unwilling admiration in that of his companion. And yet Angus Stuart, captain in the London Scottish, was repeating to himself the quaint, moving Scotch phrase, “A guid sight for sair e’en.”

Lily Fairfield was certainly an agreeable example of what the cynics tell you will soon be a vision of the past—a delightfully pretty, happy hearted, simple natured, old-fashioned English girl—a girl who had “done her bit” in the Great War, and yet who was as unsophisticated as her grandmother might have been—though eager for any fun or pleasure that might come her way.

Lily’s horrid nightmare faded into nothingness. It seemed so wonderful, after having left a London dark in fog and rain, to find herself in this fairyland of beauty. On her left a brilliant sun gleamed on the softly lapping waters of the Mediterranean, while to her right the train was rushing past lovely gardens full of the exquisite colouring which belongs to the French Riviera alone.

Could it really be only four days since Uncle Tom had seen her off at Victoria?

Though neither of them had said much, each had known it to be a solemn parting, the end of a happy chapter which had begun when Lily was five years old. Sixteen years had gone by since the orphan child had arrived at The Nest, Epsom, to become the charge, and in time the beloved adopted daughter, of her father’s brother, a retired member of the Indian Medical Service, and his prim but kindly wife.

At first the war had not made much difference to The Nest and its occupants. Uncle Tom had taken over the practice of a resident doctor who had gone off to the front; and after the war had lasted two years Aunt Emmeline had at last allowed Lily to do some war work. This was not an amusing, exciting job of the kind so many of her young friends were doing, for it consisted in the dull business of looking after some Belgian refugees. Incidentally, she had thus acquired a good colloquial knowledge of French, a knowledge which should now prove useful.