Dowie noticed that she did not stay up late that night and that when she went to bed she knelt a long time by her bedside saying her prayers. Oh! What a little girl she looked, Dowie thought,—in her white night gown with her long curly plait hanging down her back tied with a blue ribbon! And she to be the mother of a child—that was no more than one herself!
When all the prayers were ended and Dowie came back to the room to tuck her in, her face was marvellously still-looking and somehow remotely sweet as if she had not quite returned from some place of wonderful calm.
She nestled into the softness of the pillow with her hand under her cheek and her lids dropped quietly at once.
"Good night, Dowie dear," she murmured. "I am going to sleep."
To sleep in a moment or so Dowie saw she went—with the soft suddenness of a baby in its cradle.
But it could not be said that Dowie slept soon. She found herself lying awake listening to the wind whirling and crying round the tower. The sound had something painfully human in it which made her conscious of a shivering inward tremor.
"It sounds as if something—that has been hurt and is cold and lonely wants to get in where things are human and warm," was her troubled thought.
It was a thought so troubled that she could not rest and in spite of her efforts to lie still she turned from side to side listening in an abnormal mood.
"I'm foolish," she whispered. "If I don't get hold of myself I shall lose my senses. I don't feel like myself. Would it be too silly if I got up and opened a tower window?"
She actually got out of her bed quietly and crept to the tower room and opened one. The crying wind rushed in and past her with a soft cold sweep. It was not a bitter wind, only a piteous one.