Page:Restless Earth.djvu/90

A sense of utter loneliness possessed Grace Harley as she took her seat in the Hastings ’bus.

Never before had she left Joan to the care of a stranger, even for two hours, and every dire possibility raced through her mind, temporarily obscuring the aching suspense which had been hers for a month past. Some of the child’s fear had communicated itself to her, and she had difficulty in restraining an impulse to leap from the ’bus as the vehicle moved off noisily.

When they were lumbering through the outskirts of the town the conviction came to her that something was going to happen to Joan—something terrible. She caught her breath as her heart leapt in strange dread. She rose to her feet swiftly; but the curious glances of her fellow passengers, and the driver’s attitude of calm meditation as he gazed at the road ahead, revived her self-consciousness, and she sat down again, ashamed.

Nothing could possibly happen to Joan, she argued silently. Miss Whipple was one of those dear souls who delight in children, having been denied children of her own, and Joan was perfectly safe with her. Joan had all a child’s natural artfulness—“cunning” was too trenchant a word—and the “fear” and “shakiness” were doubtless artifices directed at her mother’s design of going to Hastings alone. The child loved riding in ’buses, and was naturally disappointed.

But no argument could shake off the presentiment of tragedy, and her reasoning brought Grace Harley no real peace of mind. Her fingers drummed restlessly on her handbag as he gazed through the rattling glass at the moving panorama of sun-browned pastures backed by sweeping hills.

A passionate longing for the evergreen countryside of Taranaki, for the little house upon the brink of the grass-clothed gully, for the purring of a