Her arm coiled closer round my neck and she closed her eyes again, sighing and moving restlessly. Presently she lay very quiet, her exhaustion seeming like sleep. How long had she tormented herself before she came to me?
My brain was busy, but my heart outran it. Now, now if ever, I would assert myself, my power, my position. She should not call to me in vain. What I would do, I did not know; but the thing she dreaded should not be. But although I was in this fever, I did not stir; she was resting in peace; let her rest as long as she would. For more than an hour she lay there in my arms; I grew stiff and very weary, but I did not move. At last I believe that in very truth she slept.
The clock in the tower struck midnight, and the quarter, and the half-hour. I had rehearsed what I should say to my mother and what to Hammerfeldt. I had dreamed how this night should knit her and me so closely that we could never again drift apart, that now we knew one another and for each of us what was superficial in the other existed no more, but was swept away by the flood of full sympathy. She and I against the world if need be!
A shiver ran through her; she opened her eyes wide and wider, looking round the room no longer in fear, but in a sort of wonder. Her gaze rested an instant on my face, she drew her arm from round my neck and rose to her feet, pushing away my arm. There she stood for a moment with a strange, fretful, ashamed look on her face. She tossed her head, flinging her hair back behind her shoulders. I had taken her hand and still held it; now she drew it also away.
"What must you think of me?" she said. "Good gracious, I'm in my nightgown."
She walked across to the looking-glass and stood opposite to it.
"What a fright I look!" she said. "How long have I been here?"
"I don't know; more than an hour."
"It was horrid in bed to-night," she said in a half-embarrassed yet half-absent way. "I got thinking about—about all sorts of things, and I was frightened."
The change in her mood sealed my lips.