[The Hermit of Far End by Margaret Pedler]@TWC D-Link bookThe Hermit of Far End CHAPTER I 7/15
You can go back to your breakfast." "Very good, miss." He touched his hat and plunged back again into the woods. The girl stood still, looking after him.
She was rather white, but she remained very erect and taut until the keeper had disappeared from view. Then the tense rigidity of her figure slackened, as a stretched wire slackens when the pull on it suddenly ceases, and she leaned helpless against the trunk of a tree, limp and shaking, every fine-strung nerve ajar with the strain of her recent encounter with Black Brady.
As she felt her knees giving way weakly beneath her, a dogged little smile twisted her lips. "You are a cool 'and, and no mistake," she whispered shakily, an ironical gleam flickering in her eyes. She propped herself up against the friendly tree, and, after a few minutes, the quick throbbing of her heard steadied down and the colour began to steal back into her lips.
At length she stooped, and, picking up her hat, which had fallen off and lay on the ground at her feet, she proceeded to make her way through the woods in the direction of the house. Barrow Court, as the name implied, was situated on the brow of a hill, sheltered from the north and easterly winds by a thick belt of pines which half-encircled it, for ever murmuring and whispering together as pine-trees will. To Sara Tennant, the soft, sibilant noise was a beloved and familiar sound.
From the first moment when, as a child, she had come to live at Barrow, the insistent murmur of the pines had held an extraordinary fascination for her.
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