"Can no one keep her if she wants to go?"
She finished her preparations; as she fastened the coral necklace round her neck the face of Martin Warlock was suddenly before her. He had been perhaps at her elbow all day.
"I like him and I think he likes me," she said to the mirror. "I've got one friend," and her thought still further was that even if he didn't like her he couldn't prevent her liking him.
She went down to the drawing-room and found Uncle Mathew, alone, waiting for her.
"Here I am, Maggie," he said. "And let's get out of this as quick as we can."
"I must go and say good-night to the aunts," she said.
She went upstairs to Aunt Anne's bedroom. Entering it was always to her like passing into a shadowed church after the hot sunshine—the long, thin room with high slender windows, the long hard bed, of the most perfect whiteness and neatness, the heavy black-framed picture of "The Ascension" over the bed, and the utter stillness broken by no sound of clock or bell—even the fire seemed frozen into a glassy purity in the grate.
Her aunt was sitting, as so often Maggie found her, in a stiff-backed chair, her hands folded on her lap, staring in front of her. Her eyes were like the open eyes of a dead woman; it was as though, with a great effort of almost desperate concentration, she were driving her vision against some obstinate world of opposition, and the whole of life had meanwhile stayed to watch the issue.
A thin pale light from some street lamp lay, a faintly golden shadow, across the white ceiling.
Maggie stood by the door.