"You must go to bed, dear. You are tired out. Your nerves have never recovered from the time of Mr. Porter's death. That's what it is.... You must go to bed, dear."
Mrs. Porter went. She seemed to be relieved by her outburst. She felt perhaps now less lonely. It seemed, too, that she had less to fear now that she had betrayed her ghost into sunlight. She slept better that night than she had done for a long time past. Miss Allen sat beside the bed staring into the darkness, thinking....
For a week after this they were happy. Mrs. Porter was in high spirits. They went to the Coliseum and heard Miss Florence Smithson sing "Roses of Picardy," and in the Cinema they were delighted with the charm and simplicity of Alma Taylor. Mrs. Porter lost her heart to Alma Taylor. "That's a sweet girl," she said. "I would like to meet her. I'm sure she's good." "I'm sure she is," said Miss Allen. Mrs. Porter made friends in the flat. Mr. Nix met them one day at the bottom of the lift and talked to them so pleasantly. "What a gentleman!" said Mrs. Porter afterwards as she took off her bonnet.
Then one evening Miss Allen came into the sitting-room and stopped dead, frozen rigid on the threshold. Someone was in the room. She did not at first think of Mr. Porter. She was only sure that someone was there. Mrs. Porter was in her bedroom changing her dress.
Miss Allen said, "Who's there?" She walked forward. The dim evening saffron light powdered the walls with trembling colour. The canaries twittered, the clock ticked; no one was there. After that instant of horror she was to know no relief. It was as though that spoken "Who's there?" had admitted her into the open acceptance of a fact that she ought for ever to have denied.
She was a woman of common sense, of rational thought, scornful of superstition and sentiment. She realised now that there was something quite definite for her to fight, something as definite as disease, as pain, as poverty and hunger. She realised too that she was there to protect Mrs. Porter from everything—yes, from everything and everybody!
Her first thought was to escape from the flat, and especially from everything in the flat—from the pink sofa, the gate-legged table, the bird-cage and the clock. She saw then that, if she yielded to this desire, they would be driven, the two of them, into perpetual flight, and that the very necessity of escaping would only admit the more the conviction of defeat. No, they must stay where they were; that place was their battle-ground.
She determined, too, that Mr. Porter's name should not be mentioned between them again. Mrs. Porter must be assured that she had forgotten his very existence.
Soon she arrived at an exact knowledge of the arrival of these "attacks," as she called them. That month of May gave them wonderful weather. The evenings were so beautiful that they sat always with the windows open behind them, and the dim colour of the night-glow softened the lamplight and brought with it scents and breezes and a happy murmurous undertone. She received again and again in these May evenings that earlier impression of someone's entrance into the room. It came to her, as she sat with her back to the fireplace, with the conviction that a pair of eyes were staring at her. Those eyes willed her to him, and she would not; but soon she seemed to know them, cold, hard, and separated from her, she fancied, by glasses. They seemed, too, to bend down upon her from a height. She was desperately conscious at these moments of Mrs. Porter. Was the old lady also aware? She could not tell. Mrs. Porter still cast at her those odd, furtive glances, as though to see whether she suspected anything, but she never looked at the fireplace nor started as though the door was suddenly opened.