Blanche flushed.  “Horrid, insufferable woman!” she thought angrily as she went upstairs.  “How thankful I shall be to see the last of her!”

Opening her box, she began to throw her belongings in viciously.  From without came the crunch of Billy Penticost’s boots as he crossed the little yard and the clink of a pail set down; then the rhythmic sound of pumping, so like the stertorous breathing of some vast creature, rose on the morning air.  A sudden loathing of country sights and sounds gripped Blanche, and, tearing off her faded frock, she began to dress herself in the one smart travelling gown she had brought with her.

“I don’t care what Mrs. Penticost thinks!” she told her reflection in the blurred looking-glass as she pulled a gold-coloured ribbon round her waist; “I don’t care what any of them think—­they’re just country bumpkins, with no ideas in their heads beyond crops and cows!”

Without warning, a throb of memory assailed her:  was it only a month ago she had stood in this room in the moonlight, waiting to go and meet Ishmael in the field?  Her fingers shook a little as she took a few blossoms of creamy-yellow toadflax he had picked for her out of their vase and laid them tentatively against her gown.  They harmonised to perfection, but Blanche, after a moment’s hesitation, flung them down.

“I’ll buy some roses in Exeter,” she thought; “they’ll look more suitable than hedge-flowers.”  It was her definite rejection of the country and all it stood for; but on a gust of sentiment she picked up the toadflax blossoms and stuck them in water again—­her last tribute to the memory of Ishmael.

CHAPTER XVI

THE GREY WORLD

During the next few months pain became a habit of mind with Ishmael, a habit which was to grow into a blessing for him, preventing him ever again feeling with such acuteness.  From time to time he fell into deadness of all sensation, when he hoped that the worst of his suffering was over; but always it struggled up out of the numbness again, as insistent as before.  He fought his lassitude of spirit as stubbornly as the periods of active pain, but both with the same result, the opposition probably only making both last the longer.  He would doubtless have pulled through more quickly if he had gone away, joined Killigrew in Paris, or gone on some tour with Boase.  But partly from a stubborn sense of not deserting his post, partly because things were not doing well in the farming world just then, and partly because of the true instinct of the lover which bids him stay where the feet of his mistress have passed, though the suffering thereby be doubled, he stayed on at Cloom.  At Cloom—­where there was no evading the thought of her amid the memories, where every stile and field held some fragrance from what he had thought her, where the very air that blew across his brow seemed as though it blew from her.  If he had left he would have had to take with him the image of her as he now knew her; by staying he kept the ghost of the Blanche he had imagined her to be when she was still there.