"I've been up and listened," she said. "She's perfectly quiet. She must be asleep."
Jeff rose.
"Come, father," he said. "You'll be drowsy as an owl to-morrow. We'd better get up early, all of us."
"Yes," said Anne. She knew what he meant. They had, somehow, a distasteful, puzzling piece of work cut out for them. They must be up to cope with this strange Esther.
Lydia fell asleep almost, as the cosy saying goes, as soon as her head touched the pillow. She was dead tired. But in what seemed to her the middle of the night, she heard a little noise, and flew out of bed, still dazed and blinking. She thought it was the click of a door. But Esther's door was shut, the front door, too, for she crept into the hall and peered over the railing. She went to the hall window and looked out on the dark shrubbery above the snow, and the night was still and the scene so kind it calmed her. But she could not see, beyond the shrubbery, the black figure running softly down the walk. Lydia went back to bed, and when the "midnight" hooted she drew the clothes closer about her ears and thought how glad she was to be so comfortable. It was not until the next morning that she knew the "midnight" had carried Esther with it.
XL
It was strangely neutral, the hue of the moment when they discovered she had gone. They had not called her in the morning, but Anne had listened many times at the door, and Lydia had prepared a choice tray for her, and Mary Nellen tried to keep the coals at the right ardour for toasting. Jeff had stayed in the house, walking uneasily about, and at a little after ten he came out of his chair as if he suddenly recognised the folly of staying in it so apathetically.
"Go up," he said to Lydia. "Knock. Then try the door."
Lydia got no answer to her knock, and the door yielded to her. There was the bed untouched, on the hearth the cold ashes of last night's fire. She stood stupidly looking until Jeff, listening at the foot of the stairs, called to her and then himself ran up. He read the chill order of the room and his eyes came back to Lydia's face.