“Madame knows without doubt that monsieur has gone away?”
“Has he paid the bill?” Sophia asked bluntly.
“But yes, madame, till to-morrow. Then madame has want of nothing?”
“If you will extinguish the candle,” said Sophia.
He had deserted her, then!
“All this,” she reflected, listening in the dark to the ceaseless rattle of the street, “because mother and Constance wanted to see the elephant, and I had to go into father’s room! I should never have caught sight of him from the drawing-room window!”
IV
She passed a night of physical misery, exasperated by the tireless rattling vitality of the street. She kept saying to herself: “I’m all alone now, and I’m going to be ill. I am ill.” She saw herself dying in Paris, and heard the expressions of facile sympathy and idle curiosity drawn forth by the sight of the dead body of this foreign woman in a little Paris hotel. She reached the stage, in the gradual excruciation of her nerves, when she was obliged to concentrate her agonized mind on an intense and painful expectancy of the next new noise, which when it came increased her torture and decreased her strength to support it. She went through all the interminable dilatoriness of the dawn, from the moment when she could scarcely discern the window to the moment when she could read the word ‘Bock’ on the red circlet of paper which had tossed all night on the sea of the counterpane. She knew she would never sleep again. She could not imagine herself asleep; and then she was startled by a sound that seemed to clash with the rest of her impressions. It was a knocking at the door. With a start she perceived that she must have been asleep.
“Enter,” she murmured.
There entered the menial in alpaca. His waxen face showed a morose commiseration. He noiselessly approached the bed—he seemed to have none of the characteristics of a man, but to be a creature infinitely mysterious and aloof from humanity—and held out to Sophia a visiting card in his grey hand.