He cut another piece off the carnation stalks, they were still too long. He did not wish Julia there; he fancied that it was likely she would not easily find her place among the people he would meet at his journey's end. But if there were no end--if he were going somewhere else, east or west, north or south--say a certain old oriental town, old and wicked as time itself, and full of the mystery and indefinable charm of age, and iniquity, and transcendent beauty--she would like that; she would grasp the whole, without attempting to express or judge it. Or a little far-off Tyrolean village, remote as the mountains from the life of the world--she would like that; the discomfort would be nothing to her, the primitiveness, the simplicity, everything. If he were going to some such place--why, then, there were worse things than having to take the companion of the holiday too.
He handed back the carnations, and then unthinkingly put his hand into his coat-pocket. His fingers came in contact with some dry rubbish, little more than stalks and dust, but still exhaling something of the fragrance which had been sun distilled on the Dunes. He recognised it now--Julia's flowers, put there in the wood, and forgotten until now.
"Thanks so much for cutting them," said the girl with the carnations, smelling them before she fastened them on again. "I really think they are my favourite flower; the scent is so delicious--quite the nicest flower of all, don't you think so?"
"I'm not sure," Rawson-Clew said thoughtfully, and when he spoke thoughtfully he drawled very much, "I'm not sure I don't sometimes prefer wild thyme."
It was about ten o'clock on an October night; everything was intensely quiet in the big kitchen where Julia stood. It was not a cheerful place even in the day time, the windows looked north, and were very high up; the walls and floor were alike of grey stone, which gave it a prison-like aspect, and also took much scrubbing, as she had reason to know. It was far too large a place to be warmed by the small stove now used; Julia sometimes wondered if the big one that stood empty in its place would have been sufficient to warm it. She glanced at it now, but without interest; she was very tired, it was almost bed-time, and she had done, as she had every day since she first joined Herr Van de Greutz's household, a very good day's work. She had scarcely been outside the four walls since she first came there on the day after the holiday on the Dunes. This had been her own choice, for, unlike all the cooks who had been before her, she had asked for no evenings out. Marthe, the short-tempered housekeeper, had not troubled herself to wonder why, she had been only too pleased to accept the arrangement without comment. Apart from the self-chosen confinement, the life had been hard enough; the work was hard, the service hard and ill-paid, and both the other inmates of the house cross-grained, and difficult to please. These things, however, Julia did not mind; discomfort never mattered much to her when she had an end in view; in this case, too, the end should more than repay the worst of her two task-masters. Which was agreeable, and almost made his unpleasantness desirable, as providing her intended act with a justification.