Thought died in her brain. Only the imaginative power was alive. Imagination's self died. Only her soul was alive. And, with her soul, she dreamed a dream.
She dreamed that her letter to Hector had been written, that Hector had answered it. She saw herself setting out to meet him. He had sent his car to fetch her from Embankment House. She saw herself stepping into the car. It was their old car; but the man whose back she could see through the plate-glass of the cabriolet was not their old chauffeur. "I wonder what his name is," she thought.
The car set out, noiseless. It left Embankment House behind; it crossed Putney Bridge. It came, between miles and miles of utterly empty streets, into London. A peculiar grayness, neither of the night nor of the day, a peculiar silence, almost a silence of death, brooded over London. No lights gleamed from its ghostly houses; no feet, no wheels echoed on its ghostly paving.
The car spun on, noiseless--beyond the ghostly gray into ghostly green--and now it seemed to Aliette as though the time were twilight-time; as though she were in Hyde Park; as though in a few minutes she would make the remembered door in Lancaster Gate.
"Hector's house," she thought. And the thought frightened her. She wanted not to go to Hector. She wanted Ronnie--her Ronnie. But the car spun on.
Now, faltering and afraid, she stood before the door of her husband's house. Now the door opened; and Lennard, subservient as ever, led her into the recollected hall.
Lennard vanished; and suddenly Aliette's soul knew its dream for dream.
Then the dream grew real again. Fearful and alone she stood in the chill vastness of that shadowy hall among the recollected furniture. She felt her breasts throbbing under the thin frock, felt her knees tremble as she grasped the door-handle of Hector's study.
No lights burned in the study. It was all gray, gray as the streets without. Hector was not there--only a face--a huge, cruel, unrelenting face.
"So you've come back," it said.