“I’m going to put the light out now.”
“All right.”
They had always shared a bedroom and never exchanged formal good-nights.
In the dark, a tremendous weariness suddenly came over Elsie. She felt thankful to be in her warm, narrow bed, and blissfully relived the evening’s experience.
She found that she could thrill profoundly to the memory of those ardent moments, and even the bodily lassitude that overwhelmed her held a certain luxuriousness.
Dimly, and without any conscious analysis, she felt that for the first time in her sixteen years of life she had glimpsed a reason why she should exist. It was for this that she had been made.
No thought of the future preoccupied her for a moment. She did not even regret that Norman Roberts should be going away next day.
“I must get up in good time to-morrow, and get a word with him in the drawing-room before he’s off,” was her last waking thought.
But she was sleeping profoundly, her head under the bedclothes, when Mrs. Palmer’s customary bang at the door sounded next morning soon after six o’clock.
“Wake up, girls.”