"Twenty-four hours," she repeated. "Five o'clock in the morning. Dawn. Breakfast-time, maybe. Oh, it's horrible!"
Rich said nothing more. Without a glance at them he quietly left the library.
The minutes dragged on. With an instinct of neatness, Ann replaced the volume of the encyclopedia on its shelf.
"I think I'll go home," she decided in a colorless voice. "There's nothing I can do here, and I've got to be up early tomorrow morning. Will you — will you walk part of the way with me?"
"I'll walk all the way with you."
"I go out the back. It's only in Drayton Road, near here.-You go up Elm Lane, behind the house, and turn into Old Bath Road."
With no foreboding of what was to come within the next half-hour, Courtney opened the door for her. They tiptoed across the hardwood floor of the hall to the dining room. Some sort of subdued argument now seemed to be going on in the hall upstairs. Two words, "continuous contraction," emerged in H.M.'s voice, followed by the fierce shushing tones of Dr. Nithsdale.
The dining room was dark, but the white-tiled kitchen beyond was lighted. A clock ticked with homely effect on a shelf over the refrigerator. Daisy Fenton, her eyes red with weeping, sat rigidly on a kitchen chair and occasionally wiped her eyes with a corner of her apron.
By the sink stood a stout gray-haired woman whom Courtney supposed to be Mrs. Propper, the cook. Though she held herself like a grenadier, her own eyebalk had a strained look which indicated emotion not far off.
A swing door (which, unexpectedly, did not creak at all) admitted Ann and Courtney to this warm domestic interior.