They stood for a moment looking at each other quietly. Then, to stifle the scream Anne felt rising beyond her control, she yawned.
"Good night. There's no need to keep on talking about it, is there?"
"None at all. Good night."
She turned out the light over the sewing table and went behind the screen. Her garments dropped with the soft swish. Roger heard her open the windows and get into bed.
He stood leaning his elbows on the mantelshelf, his face in his hands, for what seemed to Anne an entire lifetime.
In reality it was not half an hour. This was the situation he had been reluctant to face, had wasted weeks of thought upon. Anne seized the first suggestion, yawned in his face and went to bed. It was almost funny.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
The next morning Roger went before Anne awoke. In the afternoon a messenger brought a note asking to have his things sent to the office. At dusk the express came and Anne watched Roger's trunk down the stairs and the truck clang away over the grass-grown cobbles. When the last sound had died she went in, fed Rogie and let him kick for a while naked before the fire. When he crumpled in sleep upon the rug, Anne carried him to bed, to the crib back now beside the wide bed, hers alone. A little later she was asleep beside him.
The hours heaped themselves to days, the days dropped under their weight to nights. Each day was the same as another. Anne neither cried, regretted, nor rebelled. She did not even think. She seemed to be moving in a clear, white light that illuminated every cranny of the past, so that the shadows which had been her thoughts and reactions to Roger and the world, were now obliterated in this dazzling lucidity, a light so vivid and intense that nothing but itself existed, a wordless understanding and acceptance. Anne could not have said what it was she so clearly understood, but she moved in a petrifaction of calm. Her exhausted nerves were dead.
On the tenth day, Anne received a short note enclosing two-thirds of Roger's salary, with the receipt for the rent and the electric bill and asking her to make some arrangement for his seeing Rogie. On the third reading, the meaning penetrated and Anne faced the future.