"Yes, all right, Bessie."
"Then good-night, my dear."
"Good-night."
The door was closed; she heard Bessie tramp higher up the stairs, and she rose stealthily to her feet. She was in that state of fear when to breathe is to court danger, and noiselessly she turned and took the time-table from its shelf. The leaping of her heart seemed to confuse her sight, but soon she had made sense of the narrow print and turned down the page.
She locked the desk and put out the gas, and crossed the dark landing to her dark room. Standing before her window, with the twinkling dock lights to comfort her, she was able to believe herself fanciful and absurd. Yet he had been told danger lay in wait for him among the hills, and he had gone without asking for her company, and he had gone strangely, and those letters she had read so eagerly seemed to have been given to her with his dying breath.
But she would not think it. She refused the horror of her thoughts, and, jumping into bed, she forced herself to sleep.
Easter morning came strong and sunny, with the sound of many bells that scattered fear relentlessly in their pealing joy, yet they had not done their ringing when the summons came. "Will you come at once?" it said, and it bore Alexander's name.
[CHAPTER XXIX]
On that long journey she thought hardly at all of what lay before her. She tried to feel anxiety, and could not. Her mind was occupied with little things. She became interested in her fellow-travellers, and talked to them; they told her their family histories as surely as they looked at her, and sometimes, across their narratives, there dropped the cloud of her distress. It lived in her consciousness, vague and impenetrable, and she was aware of it as one is aware of thunder in the air. She was amazed at her own callousness. Something dreadful had happened; some horror was awaiting her among the quiet hills, but she hardly feared it, and, having splashed a few rough and lurid pictures on her brain, her imagination rested, and she was content to see how the trees were budding and the flowers sprinkling the fields.