Maud gathered her energies for one supreme effort though she felt almost too stiff with cold to move. The cabman shambled down and opened the door.
"No one about seemin'ly," he remarked.
She controlled her quivering nerves. "Perhaps you will get down my trunk," she said. "You can leave it in the porch."
The man grumbled to himself, but proceeded to comply, she standing on the step to watch him.
The mist was beating in from the sea. Her face was wet with it. And yet her dread of entering that house was such that she could hardly bring herself to open the swing door, debating with herself if even then she might not run up the hill to the house in which they had lodged a year before--only a year before--and obtain shelter for the night there.
The darkness and the rain deterred her. Her courage seemed to have quite left her. In the end she turned with a species of dreary desperation and pushed back the heavy door.
The entrance-hall was empty, vaguely lit by one flaring gas-jet round which the fog-wreaths curled and drifted in the draught, cold as a vault, and smelling of stale tobacco-smoke. The place looked bare and poverty-stricken, almost squalid. The rugs were gone from the floor, the pictures from the walls.
The door swung closed behind her, and she felt as if she stood inside a prison. The office-window was shut, and no sound came from any quarter. Only through the desolate silence there came the sullen thump of the sea against the wall, like the waning struggle of a giant grown impotent with long and fruitless striving.
The utter solitude of the place began to possess her like an evil dream. She stood as one under a spell, afraid to move. And then, quite suddenly, she heard a step.
The impulse came to her then to flee, but she did not obey it. She stood stiffly waiting. Even if it were Giles Sheppard himself, she would meet him before she went out into the dripping dark outside.