Mrs. Pendyce spent the early part of the morning in the usual way.  Half an hour after the Squire went out she ordered the carriage round, had two small trunks, which she had packed herself, brought down, and leisurely, with her little green bag, got in.  To her maid, to the butler Bester, to the coachman Benson, she said that she was going up to stay with Mr. George.  Norah and Bee were at the Tharps’, so that there was no one to take leave of but old Roy, the Skye; and lest that leave-taking should prove too much for her, she took him with her to the station.

For her husband she left a little note, placing it where she knew he must see it at once, and no one else see it at all.  “Dear Horace,

“I have gone up to London to be with George.  My address will be Green’s Hotel, Bond Street.  You will remember what I said last night.  Perhaps you did not quite realise that I meant it.  Take care of poor old Roy, and don’t let them give him too much meat this hot weather.  Jackman knows better than Ellis how to manage the roses this year.  I should like to be told how poor Rose Barter gets on.  Please do not worry about me.  I shall write to dear Gerald when necessary, but I don’t feel like writing to him or the girls at present.

“Good-bye, dear Horace; I am sorry if I grieve you.

                              “Your wife,
                                   “Margery Pendyce.”

Just as there was nothing violent in her manner of taking this step, so there was nothing violent in her conception of it.  To her it was not running away, a setting of her husband at defiance; there was no concealment of address, no melodramatic “I cannot come back to you.”  Such methods, such pistol-holdings, would have seemed to her ridiculous.  It is true that practical details, such as the financial consequences, escaped the grasp of her mind, but even in this, her view, or rather lack of view, was really the wide, the even one.  Horace would not let her starve:  the idea was inconceivable.  There was, too, her own three hundred a year.  She had, indeed, no idea how much this meant, or what it represented, neither was she concerned, for she said to herself, “I should be quite happy in a cottage with Roy and my flowers;” and though, of course, she had not the smallest experience to go by, it was quite possible that she was right.  Things which to others came only by money, to a Totteridge came without, and even if they came not, could well be dispensed with—­for to this quality of soul, this gentle self-sufficiency, had the ages worked to bring her.

Yet it was hastily and with her head bent that she stepped from the carriage at the station, and the old Skye, who from the brougham seat could just see out of the window, from the tears on his nose that were not his own, from something in his heart that was, knew this was no common parting and whined behind the glass.