She tumbled down on to the bed. She felt sick. It was a quarter past ten. She had three hours to wait. She knew what she was going to do, try to do. At one o'clock she would take off her shoes and go down the passage and see if his door were locked. He would be asleep. He must, oh, he must be asleep—she twisted about in the terror that smote her at the thought that he might perhaps not be asleep....
"God does love me," she said to herself, "I am His child. Haven't I sinned and repented? Haven't I done all the things? He's bound to help me, to save me. It is the wicked He saves—I am wicked—"
Her heart stood still at the fearful thought that perhaps she had not yet been after all wicked enough, not wicked enough to be saved.
People belonging to the other rooms began to come back to bed. Somebody in the next room sang while he was undressing, a gay Italian song, and presently he smoked, and the smoke came in under the door between her room and his.
She lay in the dark, or rather in the lights and shadows of the uncurtained room, and every two or three minutes a tramcar passed and shut out other sounds. Ingram must have come in long ago. When it was midnight she got up and arranged her shoes and hat just inside the door so that she could seize them as she came back, supposing she had been successful, and rush on straight downstairs and out and to the station. All other thoughts were now lost in the intentness with which she was concentrated on what she had to do exactly next. She would not let herself look aside at the abyss yawning if she were not successful. She gripped hold of the thing she had to do, the getting of the money, and fixed her whole self on that alone.
She lay down on the bed again, her hands clenched as though in them she held her determination. Once her thoughts did slip off to Robert, to the extreme desolation of what was waiting for her there, and tears came through her tightly shut eyelids.
"It's what you've deserved," she whispered, struggling to stop them. "Yes, but he hasn't deserved it. Robert hasn't deserved it—you've ruined him—" she was forced to go on.
She shook off the unnerving thoughts. By her watch it was a quarter to one.
She stood up and began to listen.
The tramcars passed now only every ten minutes. In between their passing the hôtel was quiet. She would wait for the approach of the next one—in the stillness she could hear it coming a long way off—then she would run down the passage in her stockinged feet to Ingram's door and open it just as the noise was loudest.