The air was full of fancies. It was a stormy night, and the wind was wailing round her corner of the building, and every now and then a sharp blast of driving rain would strike upon her window. She heard the rain distinctly dropping down the pane like tears, and she fancied—oh, it was a dreadful fancy!—that it was drops of blood.
She bore it in that lonely room as long as she could, and then she got up and went out into the passage. The lights were out, and the place was quite still; everybody had gone to bed. Dark and deserted as the corridor was, it was not so lonely as her own room. There were girls sleeping behind every one of those closed doors. She heard them—for the ventilators of most were open—breathing audibly, and some were moaning in their sleep.
Lucy walked up and down the long corridor; her feet were bare, and she had thrown nothing over her shoulders. Cousin Mary would have scolded her dreadfully if she had seen her, with her white garments trailing on the stone floor.
She never thought of the draughts or the cold stones; she only thought of getting away from that everlasting drip, drip of the window-pane, that brought the scene of the afternoon so vividly before her. She was nervous and overwrought, and she was burdened with a secret she ought never to have bound herself to keep.
Wild horses shouldn't tear it from her, she told herself, as she paced up and down that draughty passage. Whatever happened, she would be true to her word. It would be hard if a girl couldn't be trusted as well as a man. What was the use of coming to Newnham if gossip and emptiness—the habits of the slave—still had dominion over her?
It was all very fine and high-sounding; but she would have given the world to have told somebody, to have eased her overburdened mind and poured out the dreadful story on some soft feminine, sympathetic bosom.
And then, while she was telling herself all these fine things, and repeating Lord Tennyson's nice verses about that open fountain that was to wash away all those silly human things and make woman perfect—quite perfect—a strange thing happened.
She heard the voice of the man praying. He was praying now; she heard him quite distinctly, but she could not catch the words. She was quite sure it was the voice; it had sunk down so deep into her ears that she could never forget it. Lucy paused in the darkness and listened. The voice came from a room at the door of which she was standing. She had no idea, in the darkness, whose room it was; she was only sure—quite sure—of the voice.
An overpowering desire to see the speaker—perhaps to get her release—seized her, and she opened the door of the room.
There was no man there praying; there was only a girl sitting reading by the light of a shaded lamp, and she was reading aloud. It was Pamela Gwatkin, and she was reading a Greek play.