With further folly of tears and mad loving words we parted, and I bore my heartache away, leaving her to bear hers into her new life.
And now she was to be married to-morrow, and I could not sleep.
When the darkness became unbearable I lighted a candle, and then lay staring vacantly at the roses on the wall-paper, or following with my eyes the lines and curves of the heavy mahogany furniture.
The solidity of my surroundings oppressed me. In the dull light the wardrobe loomed like a hearse, and my violin case looked like a child's coffin.
I reached a book and read till my eyes ached and the letters danced a pas fantastique up and down the page.
I got up and had ten minutes with the dumbbells. I sponged my face and hands with cold water and tried again to sleep—vainly. I lay there, miserably wide awake.
I tried to say poetry, the half-forgotten tasks of my school days even, but through everything ran the refrain—
"Kate is to be married to-morrow, and not to me, not to me!"
I tried counting up to a thousand. I tried to imagine sheep in a lane, and to count them as they jumped through a gap in an imaginary hedge—all the time-honoured spells with which sleep is wooed—vainly.
Then the Waits came, and a torture to the nerves was superadded to the torture of the heart. After fifteen minutes of carols every fibre of me seemed vibrating in an agony of physical misery.