Anne realized the possible interpretation and flushed, but if Belle had caught this meaning, she said nothing, and a few minutes later went.
As Anne closed the door behind Belle, and came back again up the stairs alone, a little of the courage that she had sincerely felt her own while she and Belle stood before the fire died away. Again before the tiny heap of gray ashes, Anne forced down the tears with an effort. Was her new-found peace to be so easily disturbed? She had been back in the city only a little over a week, and already this going of Belle made her feel so terribly alone. Anne went to the window and opened it wide. Perhaps the touch of night would bring that throbbing, silent assurance of companionship. With her elbows on the sill Anne gazed to the triangle of twinkling lights at the base of the dark hills across the bay. Faintly the murmur of the city came to her, but her hands clenched and it took all her strength to keep back the tears.
She was a part of it. But such a little part.
"I won't be lonely," she whispered fiercely. "I won't. I WON'T."
But the resolution flitted away into the blackness and left Anne tense with her own vehemence. She closed the window quickly and went into the other room. Between the cool sheets she tried to relax, to immerse her body in the vast, eternal unity of all-living, but she was conscious only of the effort and after a while she gave up trying to relax and let her thought go where it would.
It went straight to Roger. What had these months done to Roger? They had done so much to her, it seemed impossible that Roger could be just the same. And yet, she hoped he was. The old Roger she felt now she understood. A new Roger might be very strange. At first the new relationship that had to be between them would be difficult, and, with another Roger, perhaps impossible.
No, Roger must be just the same, have the same sweeping enthusiasm, the same impatience, the same intolerance of prejudice not his own. Until she had gripped more firmly her own peace, she could risk no change in Roger. At last the tightness in her muscles eased and Anne fell asleep a little comforted in her decision to write to Roger before the end of the week.
But the end of the week came and went and Anne had not written. Every evening she had tried and in the morning destroyed the letter. Some were tinged with memory, the others almost belligerent in their indifferent brevity. The second week she did not even try but convinced herself that the mood would descend upon her suddenly and she would tell Roger of her return and suggest his coming to see Rogie with exactly the right degree of friendly interest.
But the mood did not come, although Anne waited for it, in the same bodily relaxation in which Charlotte Welles entered The Silence. By the beginning of the fourth week after her return, this need to communicate with Roger and the impossibility of doing it, was destroying her peace and absorbing every waking thought. That she managed to do her work well, was only because the old power of mechanical attention had returned. Often Anne read through the transcriptions of her employer's dictation and wondered at this subconscious power that permitted her to quote correctly prices and invoices, write intelligently of fruits and vegetables, while her whole consciousness was concerned in forming a letter to Roger.
Once she thought she saw Roger on the street, and, although she would have grasped eagerly this solution if it had occurred to her before, now she turned and went rapidly in the other direction. But no sooner had she lost the possibility—if it had been really Roger—than she wished with her whole heart that she had faced certainty. She began looking for him everywhere, hoping and then dreading to meet him. From walking in places where the possibility of meeting might occur, she swung to going and coming by circuitous ways, angry with herself for her own indecision, touched sometimes even to anger at Roger.