The tea-bell pealed across the garden.
She tidied her hair, and fetching the sponge and towel stood before the glass, trying to trim her marred face into some semblance of composure. The boys would be clamouring—and one never knew.... There might be tainted food—a loose baluster—a tag of carpet.... He had his ways.... She must not baulk Him....
She went downstairs.
The children were tired and cross and quarrelsome—the heat had soured even cheerful Mrs. Denny. It was not a pleasant meal. But it could not oppress Louise. Outwardly docile and attentive, her mind had withdrawn into itself and sat aloof, inviolate, surveying its surroundings much as it would have watched the actors in a moving picture. She was impervious to bickerings and querulous comment. What did it matter? She would never have tea with them again.... She was going away from it all.... If only God did not forget....
All through the breathless evening she awaited His pleasure.
Long after the house was quiet, and Mrs. Denny tucking up her children, had come and gone, Louise lay wakeful—still waiting.
It was an airless night. Every other moment the little unaccountable noises of a sleeping building broke the warm silence. Shadows scurried across the counterpane and over her face like ghostly mice, as the trees outside her window bent and nodded to a radiant moon.
She was weary to the point of exhaustion. Momently her body seemed to shrink away from her into the depths of the bed—warm, fathomless depths—leaving her essential self to float free and uncontained. She would resign herself luxuriously to the sensation of disintegration, but with maddening regularity her next breath clicked body and soul together anew. Yet, as she drowsed, the space between breath and breath lengthened slowly, till they lay divided by incredible æons in which her thoughts wandered and lost themselves, grew hoar and died and were born again; while the dead-weight of her body sank ever deeper into sleep, was recalled to consciousness with ever increasing effort.
She speculated languidly upon her sensations. They recalled a day at the dentist's, years before. A tube had been placed over her mouth and she had struggled, remembering a hideous story of a woman—a French marquise—that she had read in a magazine. The name began with a "B" or a "V." "Brin—" something. The Funnel—The Leather Funnel—that was the name of the story.... But there came no choking water—only sweet, buzzing air.... And then her body had dropped away from her, as it was doing now.... She recalled the sensation of rest and freedom; she had passed, like a bird planing down warm breezes, into exquisite oblivion.... She had returned, centuries later, to a dull aching pain, harsh noises, and lights that were like blows.... But if she had not returned? She would have been dead.... They would have buried her.... Such things had happened.... So that was death—that cradling, beautiful sleep. And God was sending it to her now; flooding her, drowning her in its warm comfort.... God was very good.... She was sorry—sorry that she had often not believed in Him.... But Miss Hartill didn't.... But she would never see Miss Hartill any more.... Perhaps, years after, when she was tired of sleeping, she would go back and see her again.... There was All Souls' Night, when you woke up.... But she would not frighten Miss Hartill.... She laughed a little, to think that she could ever frighten Miss Hartill.... She would just kiss her, a little ghost's kiss that would feel like a puff of air ... and then she would go back and sleep and sleep and sleep ... with only the yew-berries pattering on to her gravestone to tell her when another year had drifted past.... It was funny that people could be afraid to die.... She wondered if ghosts snored, and if you heard them, if your grave were very close? It was her last thought as she slid into slumber.
Instantly the breakfast gong came crashing across her peace. She fought against waking. Her eyelids lifted the weight upon them as violets press upwards against a clod of rotten leaves. She lay dazedly, her mind cobwebbed with dreams, her thoughts trickling back into the channels of the previous night. Slowly she took in her situation. There was the window, and a shining day without: she could hear the starlings quarrelling on the lawn, and the squeak of an angry robin.... There was her room, and the tidy pile of clothes by the bed ... the bed, and she herself lying in it.... So she was not dead! There was to-day to be faced, and Miss Hartill's anger, and all the other hundreds and thousands of days....