She waited until she could hear his footsteps no longer, and then she put out the light. In a little while the window-pane emerged from the darkness, square and grey, and on it the austere larches were chiselled blackly. She rocked herself in her seat. She saw Alexander's face, lined by a fierce craving and repression, and pitifully overlaid with patience. He seemed to have looked bitter disappointment in the eyes, and made a comrade of it. His own eyes were dulled that had been so bright. She saw the painful twitching of his cheeks, and how his hands, which he had thought were hidden, clenched themselves in his pockets. She felt a masterful indignation against Theresa, who could love another than this man, and a yearning over Alexander like a mother's over a hungry child whom she is powerless to help. But Janet was not powerless.
She sat immobile, and she had first a strange ecstasy of physical lightness, as though her mind had soared easily beyond her body, and was rejoicing in the freedom, and looked distantly on the numb husk it had left, and then, with a leap, it was back in its place again, grinding at all the memories it had stored, bringing them from the corners where she had covered them in the dark, forcing them into the light. And she saw them. They were put into her hands, and she turned them over and over, knowing them again, and the power she had resisted in her clean youth swooped on her like an evil, moulting bird, and under its spread and meagre wings she sat, rocking now in pitilessness, in place of pity, dead to everything but the one thing she meant to do.
The fire dropped in the grate, the flames that had illumined her clasped hands and played fitfully on the moving body lost their power to leap, and the coals were grey, when a dog outside howled at the night.
That sound of an inexpressible woe, challenging the peaceful hour of sleep, wrenched Janet from the dark place of her wandering. She started, crossed herself, and murmured words she did not understand. She stood up, shivering, and stretched out her hands. She passed them across her eyes.
"God keep my soul from sin!" she said aloud.
She went to the door, and let the frosty cold clean her of evil.
"He mustn't get her that way," she muttered as she lit her candle. "I was lost—lost. God guard me!" And again, unknowingly, she made the sign on breast and brow, for this was what her ancestors had done.
[CHAPTER XXVIII]
For the first time since her school days Theresa had to stay in bed.