The Sternes, in truth, were grown−up people, and they had accepted her on equal terms. They were so much more alive, so much more people of the real world than anyone at Paston Hall, and they had suddenly lifted her out of this paper−thin school world of dull pretence into the rich, full world to which she ought to belong: that was the dominant feeling in Clare's heart, and that was, she knew, the source of her great happiness. They had delivered her from bondage. Niall had made amends for the sin of his slave−dealing ancestor.
Her suspicion that it was he who had caused his mother to send the invitation had grown, over Christmas, into a certainty, and the certainty made her smile tenderly. Mrs. Sterne had sent Christmas cards to all the Staff on Christmas morning. There was one for Clare, a plain, engraved card of greetings, but slipped in the envelope with it was another hurriedly made out of a folded square of paper. It bore a picture consisting chiefly of a patch of Indian ink with a few sketchy light lines to indicate the trunks of trees—the pitchy blackness of Brackenbine wood—and in the blackness four or five tiny points of light, like cats' eyes shining from the thicket; but she knew them for the little lights she had seen from the wall−top.
That little mystery excited her curiosity more than all the other new and stimulating things she had discovered at the Sternes'. She had longed to ask Niall on Christmas Eve what he was doing with his little lights in the wood, but had just lacked the assurance to frame the question. His teasing card seemed an invitation to her to ask it now. It would be something, she guessed, as unexpected and as oddly interesting as Niall's hobby of making puppets, or the old Captain's cultivation of dwarf trees. Clare was overcome with longing to be as free as Niall and his mother to do interesting things, to follow her own bent and find and exercise her own gifts. Before tea−time on that third day of Christmas a strong plant of resolution had taken root in her longing: just before it was too late, the possibility of winning the scholarship to Oxford had been demonstrated to her again. Busily and happily, she got out her notebooks and fell to planning an intensive course of revision and new study for the remaining weeks to Easter.
She left them with some reluctance when she received the Principal's summons. Miss Sperrod had never seemed so unnecessary a hindrance as now. She found Miss Geary with the Principal and was as surprised by the old lady's somewhat guilty and embarrassed look as by the sugariness of Miss Sperrod's reception of her. As usual, it took Clare some time to discern Miss Sperrod's purpose through the babble of all−but−meaningless preliminaries which she customarily put out, as if to hold off attack while she consolidated her own position. Clare saw, from the many glances she darted at Miss Geary during this preface, that she was not quite sure how her proposition was going to be received, but the proposition itself, when at length it was clearly stated, was the last one she would ever have expected the Principal to make.
It was, simply, that Mrs. Sterne, having learnt from Miss Geary that Clare was having difficulty through lack of coaching with her Latin, had suggested that she herself might give her a few private lessons each week until the scholarship examination.
While this communication was being made to Clare, Miss Geary looked steadily at the ceiling. Clare, dumbfounded, said nothing, and Miss Sperrod, interpreting that as unwillingness, outdid all previous exhibitions of vehemence and volubility that Clare had ever witnessed. It gave Clare time, however, to realise the astounding persistence of the vein of good fortune she had stumbled on; she would not for the world have disclosed to Miss Sperrod how much the offer meant to her, but she stammered some words of thanks that seemed too drastically controlled to carry any conviction, and asked when would Mrs. Sterne expect her to begin.
“I am sending a note to Mrs. Sterne,” said the Principal. “I'm replying straight away. It would be proper if you wrote a little note yourself to thank her. The lessons will have to be fitted into your time−table, of course, but you must try by all means to suit Mrs. Sterne's convenience. It will be a very great advantage to you. Mrs. Sterne is really highly qualified in the classics. Her father was quite a well−known professor. I am explaining that very carefully to your Father.”
To Clare nothing mattered much but that she should learn how soon she was expected to go to Brackenbine, and until she had found that out clearly from Miss Geary, she could not believe that she was not dreaming these arrangements. Then, when it was established that she might go off to Brackenbine any time that suited her to fix convenient hours with Mrs. Sterne, there was a preposterous confabulation about who was to take her. Miss Sperrod took instant alarm at the notion of one of her charges walking the public highway by herself; Clare had to listen to the discussion of half a dozen absurd schemes for chaperoning her, until her exasperation was such that it was on the tip of her tongue to tell the Principal tartly that she had no need at all to venture into the public road to get to Brackenbine. She remarked somewhat petulantly to Miss Geary, after they left the Principal's sitting−room, that girls younger than herself cycled alone from villages miles away to Pentabridge High School daily along that very road in term−time without anybody suggesting that they needed escorting. Miss Geary only answered gently that she did not see that what High−School girls did was really relevant. She undertook, all the same, to find a way over the difficulty.
In all the discussion between them, neither Miss Geary nor Clare mentioned Niall's presence at Brackenbine. There was no conspiracy between them to suppress the fact, but Clare was certain that Miss Sperrod did not know he was at home. She was by no means so naive as to suppose that Miss Sperrod would have found the same enthusiasm for the project if she had known that the young man was there. She took the old lady's tacit assumption that Niall's presence was no bar to her going to Brackenbine as evidence of a good breeding which nothing she knew of Miss Sperrod justified her in supposing the Principal possessed. At the same time, although she was grateful for Miss Geary's silent compliment to her own good taste and sense, she would have liked her to mention Niall; she would have liked to hear whether he had been there last summer when Miss Geary went to Brackenbine; she would have liked to know how much she knew and how much the Principal knew about Anne Otterel's visits there in the summer holidays. But Miss Geary did not enlighten her on any of this.
The old lady, however, managed the business of escorting her quite simply, by packing her off by herself soon after luncheon on the following day and saying she would meet her at Brackenbine lodge−gates to accompany her back at half−past three. They would thus be at the school again before it was dark. Clare made no question of the wisdom or convenience of the arrangement, but fled along the quiet, empty road to the old iron gates of Brackenbine as light of heart and foot as a hare set free from the net.