"Good-night," I said slowly.
"Good-night," he answered gravely. "I hope your head will be better in the morning."
Outside the door of old Mrs. Cromer's room I paused. I had a passionate and overwhelming desire to go and tell her the truth. I was in need of counsel. I craved advice. I felt that nothing in the whole world could ever be right again. The future terrified me, and all the people in it—Walter Markham, mother, father.
I felt I would give anything to go and lay my burden on someone else's shoulder.
If I felt like a mosquito at all, it was when it feels and fears the approach of winter.
XIII
I woke at midnight with an extraordinary feeling that I was the last person left alive on earth, a consciousness of desolation and isolation terrifying and indescribable. I used to get it when I was a child, and I would have gone into a lion's cage for company. I believe it is some form of nerve pressure medical men can't explain.
I got up shivering and put on my little silk kimona.
I felt I had to go to Mrs. Cromer—I had to tell her all about Walter Markham, who was getting better and who thought I loved him and wanted to marry me, and Cheneston who did not love me. I felt I had to tell her about Grace Gilpin—the very lovely person Cheneston cared for.
The impossibility of struggling through the immediate future alone and unadvised appalled me; chiefly I was terrified about Walter Markham, the man to whom I had been so horribly unkind in my kindness, the man who believed I had gone to the hospital to see him because I cared. I had fostered the belief because he was dying—and he had lived, and all the hopes I had raised and the delusions I had tenderly fostered lived with him.