Since the clock had stopped, time ceased to exist for Anne. A painful trembling of her own body brought her back to reality. The whole house trembled. The bell rang in the hall.
Blood rushed to Anne’s benumbed heart. Her knees gave way as she returned through the rooms. One after another she closed the doors behind her, looking back all the time. Near the door of the nursery a folded piece of paper lay on the floor. She picked it up and pressed it carefully between the glazed wings, as she used to do, so that they might not rattle when carriages passed below.
She only realized what she had done when the door-handle dropped back to its place, when the door was closed, the door whose rattling would wake no one any more. Anne sobbed aloud among the empty walls. The rooms repeated her sob, one after the other, gently, more and more gently....
The street door opened below. Dr. Gárdos’ commanding voice was audible on the staircase. Two men followed him, carrying a stretcher on their shoulders. Anne came face to face with them in the corridor. She swayed, as if she had been hit on the chest, then she seemed quite composed again. She opened the door and gently wakened her husband.
The stretcher, with Thomas on it, floated across the road in the early dawn as over a narrow blue river. One shore, the habitual one, was the old house, the other, the strange dark house, the strange new life in which Anne felt she had no root.
She passed the gate quickly, with her head bent. Only in the middle of the road did she stop and hesitate. She turned back suddenly.
The two pillar-men leaned out under the urns of the cornice. Their stone eyes turned to her, as if they stared straight at her accusingly and asked a question to which there was no answer.
Florian turned the big old key slowly in the door. For the last time, the very last time....
CHAPTER XIX
The new inhabitants of the strange, small lodgings found everything hostile and bleak in their new surroundings.