Shortly afterwards, Tremenheere's sister, Theodosia Kerr, with whom she corresponded regularly, perceiving listlessness in her letters and an exasperating resignation in his, threw herself into the breach by proposing that she should travel with her and her husband. Kerr was delicate, and after a yachting cruise in the Mediterranean, was going to winter in Jersey. The plan took Cynthia's fancy. She had never travelled, discovered she had a great wish to do so, and was speedily on her way to join their yacht in Southampton Water. Mrs. Kerr, in her superior wisdom of married woman, meant to give her what she spoke of to her husband as 'a good shaking-up,' and then have Tremenheere quietly out to Jersey in autumn; the result was to be all that everybody could wish! Three months later news reached Lafer Hall which struck consternation into Mrs. Hennifer's soul, and sent her over to Old Lafer to see Mrs. Severn at once. The consequence was that a few hours after Mrs. Severn was again at the Mires. CHAPTER VII AT THE MIRES A more God-forsaken-looking place than the Mires it would be impossible to imagine. Even on this glorious day in late August it looked dreary and forbidding. The cluster of stone cottages, half of them roofless, with the inner white-washed walls showing through the jagged gaps where windows and doors had been, straggled round a marsh whose pools of water glistened like scales among tufts of rush and treacherous slimy moss. The hollow was cup-like. There was no ling on its sides, they were covered with a harsh dry bent, through which the breeze swished. In one place this was disfigured by a mound of shaly refuse marking the site of an old coal-pit. Its seams had been exhausted years ago, and the miners now trudged a mile to a shaft on the edge of the firwoods that divided the Hall and Old Lafer. At one end a stream oozed from the rushes and wandered away with a forlorn look over a stratum of clay. The chirping of a grasshopper made the silence more intense. The heat was overpowering. When Anna left Borlase he drove back a little way, out of sight of the cottages. Anna half ran, half slipped through the bent. Hartas Kendrew's was the cottage from whose chimney the smoke curled. It stood a little apart from the others, and was in good repair. Scilla had even tried to make it cheerful by hanging checked curtains in the windows, and nursing a few pots of geranium and hydrangea on the sills. It seemed to Anna that they gasped for air, flattened as they were against the closed panes. She thought of Old Lafer, cool and sweet, the doors and windows wide open, and the velvety breeze wandering into every corner. Scilla's life seemed now as much cramped as her flowers. From having been a bonny blithe girl, singing about her work at Old Lafer, free from care and responsibility, she was saddened by her husband's absence in prison, and shackled with his father's drunken humours.