Mavis, seeking any reason for this slight deterioration of conduct and
steadiness, wondered if Norah by chance had a little secret love
affair up her sleeve. That would account for everything. But if so,
who could it be who was upsetting her? Girls, even at what matrons
call the silly age, can not give scope to their silliness without
opportunities; and there were no visitors to the house, and certainly
none of the men in the yard, who could conceivably be carrying on with
her.
Then the suspicions of Mavis were aroused by discovering that Norah
was at her old tricks again. If you sent her as messenger of charity
to one of the cottages, and more still if you gave her an hour or two
for herself, she went stealing off into the forbidden woods. She had
been seen doing it twice, and, as Mavis suspected, had done it often
without being seen. She knew that she wasn't allowed to do it. There
was the plain house-rule that neither she nor Ethel were ever to leave
the roads when they were out alone. Yet she broke the rule; and Mavis
now suspected that she did not break this rule in order to pick wild
flowers and look at green leaves but to meet a sweetheart.
Mavis, thinking about it, was at once angry and apprehensive.
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