“But he has made me lay bare my whole life to him and has never once spoken of his own. I only know of the existence of Ginette Grandison by an accident; he would not trust me with his secret and would be annoyed at my knowing it. No friendship can be based on anything so one-sided as our conversations have been. And the reason is plain, only that I have been too stupid to see it before. The reason is that he never intended a friendship. It amused him to get my little secret from me; it flattered his....”
But Anne suddenly checked her thought, crying: “No, that is vulgar, that is unworthy. The root of the matter is that I mean nothing to him, nothing, whilst to me he is the only man with whom I have spoken freely; the only intimate friend except Enid that I have ever had. And he cares no more for me than she did.”
A flood of tears eased her heart; she turned her face to the pillow; then, when she had done weeping, she got out of bed once more and went to the window. The air was cold; there was a gust of wind in the chimney; the weather-cock gave its gentle whine.
After standing there an hour, Anne went back to bed again with a picture of the darkness in her mind, saying to herself: “And so on for ever and ever, cold and darkness after the sunshine and the warmth of the day.”
Next morning Anne felt ill when she woke; her head ached, she was dizzy, and the outer world was seen alternately as a whirling mist and defined with extraordinary clearness. She got up from habit, but she could eat nothing at breakfast, and as soon as her bed had been made she undressed and lay down on it, and fell asleep.
When she awoke it was with the echo of Richard’s voice ringing in her ears; she scrambled out of bed and went at once to her window. There was nothing to be seen, she blinked her eyes in the brilliant sunlight and, reeling with sleep, groped her way back through the sudden darkness of the room to her bed to fall into a doze from which she awoke once more, this time with the certainty of having heard voices: beyond a doubt, one of them was Richard’s.
The voices rose for a moment; then she heard the front door slam, in a gust of wind, and there was a silence. She understood suddenly that Richard had been in the house, that he had come to see her, and she got out of bed.
The bedroom window gave on to the garden, so she ran to her father’s room just as she had done to see the ploughmen on that snowy winter morning. Her guess had been right, for there almost directly beneath her were Richard and her father; they were standing bare-headed in the rain talking amicably; she could hear her father’s gentle laugh; they were reluctant to part. Anne’s first instinct was to call out; to ask Richard to wait while she exchanged her dressing-gown for clothes in which she could appear, but she realized that it was impossible to do so, and then, with the angry feelings that every sick person has experienced of knowing that life is going on unchanged behind his back, she was forced to watch Richard disappear after shaking hands with her father by the garden gate.
“A thousand pities,” she said to herself. “He must have come to see me. What can he have said to my father?” Her headache and dizziness were gone, she felt eager and excited, and the moments while she was putting on her clothes and doing up her hair were spent in trying to imagine the conversation that had been going on while she was asleep.
“What an extraordinary thing,” said Anne, “that he should think of calling! Nobody but Richard would have done such a thing!” Her thoughts were interrupted by Maggie coming to ask her if she would like to have tea in bed. As she was going downstairs it occurred to her that Richard might have spoken of her; he would have told her father that they had met; he might even have mentioned his picture. As she opened the door into the room where her father was already sitting, she remembered the well-brought-up heroes in Victorian novels who ask a father’s permission before entering into correspondence with the girl they have rescued when the pony has taken the bit between its teeth and the governess cart is heading for the side of the quarry ... a memory which was driven away with a laugh, but which left her anxious and expectant as she took her place at the tea table.