For three days after Traill had left her, she broke under the flood of her despair. For those three days she did not move out of her rooms, taking just what nourishment there was to be found in the cupboards where they stored the food for their breakfasts. On the side of her bed she sometimes sat, biting a dry piece of bread—anything that she could find—in that unconscious instinct with which the body prompts the mind for its own preservation. But these meals—if such they can be called—she took at no stated times. Crusts of bread lay about on the table, showing how indiscriminately of order she had fed herself. For two hours together, she would sit in awful silence, with eyes strained staringly before her. Of tears, there were none. Sometimes a sob broke through her lips when a sound downstairs reminded her of him; but no tears accompanied it. It was more like the complaining cry of some animal in its sleep.
For the first two nights she just flung herself on her bed when the darkness came. She did not undress. The nights were warm then, or cold might have driven her between the clothes. But, on the third evening, she disrobed. This was habit reasserting itself. She did it unconsciously, only remembering as she crept, shuddering, between the sheets, that for the two previous nights she had not gone to bed at all.
The toppling fall of reason would soon have ended it; that merciful potion of magic which can bring a torturing misery in the guise of a quaint conceit to a mind made simple as a little child's. Another day or so, and the frightened agony that glittered in her eyes—fusing slowly towards the last great conflagration—would have burnt up in the sudden panic-flare as the reason guttered out, then smouldered down into that pitiable lightless flickering where all glimmer of intelligence is dead.
Inevitably this must have followed, had not Janet visited her late in the evening of the fourth day. Two days before, she had written saying that she would come if Traill were not likely to be there.
Her note finished abruptly, characteristic of all her letters.
"If I don't hear from you to the contrary," it concluded, "I shall arrive."
She heard nothing to the contrary. The letter had lain, since its arrival, in the box downstairs. Sally had not moved out of her room. The possibility of a letter from Traill might have drawn her forth; but she knew that such a possibility did not exist. The woman who attended to their rooms she had sent away.
"I shall be able to look after these two rooms myself," she had thought vaguely. Then she had locked herself into her bedroom, taken up a duster to begin the morning's work and, after five minutes, idly lifting each thing in her hand, she had seated herself by the side of the bed, allowing the duster to fall limply from her fingers. Then, throwing herself on to the pillows, had given way with tearless eye to her despair.
When Janet's knock fell, she was lying in bed, eyes gaping at the ceiling above her in a gaze that scarcely wandered or moved from the spot upon which they were fixed. At the unexpected sound, she sat up. Intelligence struggled for the mastery in her mind. There, in her eyes, you could see it fight for victory.
"Who's that?" she called out querulously in a thin voice.