Charity knew after she had bade goodbye to Esther, that the time had come for her to return to her father’s house.

Not with the intention of throwing herself on his mercy. No, she had no plans to do any such thing. But she knew her father well, and she knew that behind his veneer of coldness he would likely be very fearful for her wellbeing. She felt that as a daughter, she owed it to her father to set his mind at ease, to show him that she was safe.

As she walked up the lane to the vicarage, the lane that she had walked so many hundreds and thousands of times several times a day for all of her life, she noticed that every aspect of the experience seemed entirely new.

It was as if she was smelling the blossoms that were just starting to peek out from the trees for the very first time. The very crunch of the gravel and dirt beneath her shoes sounded different. Perhaps that was because, instead of her usual shoes, she was wearing a pair of Mary Warwick’s old laboring boots.

Mrs. Warwick had remarked that they would serve her much better if she wished to ‘go tramping about the country’, and by some miracle, she was the exact same size as Mary Warwick, in her dress as well as her shoes.

Perhaps it should have unnerved her to wear the clothing and shoes of a dead woman, but it did not. She felt as though Mary Warwick’s spirit was walking with her as a companion.

Mary seemed to be with her now, pointing out to her the sweet sound of the birdsong and the fresh scent of the grass, which was damp and fragrant under a layer of spring rain.

The walk to the vicarage from Mrs. Warwick’s seemed to take longer than it usually did, perhaps because Charity was living every moment of it so intently. She almost forgot to be apprehensive at the thought of seeing her father, though doubtless, he would not greet her kindly.

But her father, it seemed, was not at home.

She knew something was out of character as soon as the maid opened the door. Charity had known the woman for almost her whole life, and apparently, the maid had been instructed not to let Charity into the house. Instead, she dithered in the doorway, then mumbled that ‘the master was not at home’.

“Is he at church?” Charity asked.

The maid shook her head helplessly, and Charity sighed with a little impatience.

It seemed to her that if her father was not at home in the daytime, then there was not another place that he would be. But nonetheless, something struck her as a little odd about the fact that her father was not there. As a rule, he always used Friday afternoons to sit in his study and put the finishing touches on his sermon for Sunday. The Reverend Miller was a man of very regular habits, and she could scarcely remember the last time that he had broken this routine.

But the maid was not lying. Charity walked around the side of the house to the window of her father’s study and found it to be empty.

Feeling a little deflated — perhaps because she had been bracing herself for a grand confrontation — she went away down the garden steps.

The vicarage was only a few minutes’ walk from the churchyard, but the little walk had none of the pleasant character of her earlier stroll. Instead of being lit up by the sensations of love and the beauty of nature, Charity occupied herself with fretting.

Where was her father, and what had happened to make him discard his usual manner of doing things? Had her leaving the household thrown him into some strange fit, which was causing him to behave intemperately?

The guilt crept into her thoughts. Although she knew rationally that she had nothing to blame herself for, that her father had chosen to cast her out of the house, she could not help but think how she might better have smoothed over the situation, have stopped him from distressing himself.

It was that kind of thought she always had when she was around her father and that same kind of thinking that she had been free from over the previous days while she had been staying with Mrs. Warwick. It occurred to her that she did not know if she could continue to live with the way she always had with the threat of her father’s wrath hanging always over her head.

Perhaps, she reasoned, it is time for me to dispel it, right now. No one else can take that feeling of nervousness away from me. Only I can do it for myself, and so do it for myself, I must.

For a moment she stood still outside the churchyard, mulling over this thought.

And then it seemed to her that a weight was finally lifted, a weight that she had carried for so long that she scarcely recognized what it felt like to be without it.

When she proceeded into the church, her step was very light. Little did she know that there were things inside the church that would alter all her perceptions of the world once again.