And Sybil, coming to her side, kissed her and said in a low voice, “Good-by, darling, for a little while.... I love you....” And Jean kissed her in a shy fashion on both cheeks.
She could find nothing to say. She knew Sybil would come back, but she would be a different Sybil, a Sybil who was a woman, no longer the child who even at eighteen sometimes had the absurd trick of sitting on her mother’s knee. And she was taking away with her something that until now had belonged to Olivia, something which she could never again claim. She could find nothing to say. She could only follow them to the door, from where she saw Sabine already sitting in the motor as if nothing in the least unusual were happening; and all the while she wanted to go with them, to run away anywhere at all.
Through a mist she saw them turning to wave to her as the motor drove off, to wave gaily and happily because they were at the beginning of life.... She stood in the doorway to watch the motor-lights slipping away in silence down the lane and over the bridge through the blackness to the door of Brook Cottage. There was something about Brook Cottage ... something that was lacking from the air of Pentlands: it was where Toby Cane and Savina Pentland had had their wanton meetings.
In the still heat the sound of the distant surf came to her dimly across the marshes, and into her mind came absurdly words she had forgotten for years.... “The breaking waves dashed high on the stern and rockbound coast.” Against the accompaniment of the surf, the crickets and katydids (harbingers of autumn) kept up a fiddling and singing; and far away in the direction of Marblehead she watched the eye of a lighthouse winking and winking. She was aware of every sight and sound and odor of the breathless night. It might storm, she thought, before they got into Connecticut. They would be motoring all the night....
The lights of Sabine’s motor were moving again now, away from Brook Cottage, through O’Hara’s land, on and on in the direction of the turnpike. In the deep hollow by the river they disappeared for a moment and then were to be seen once more against the black mass of the hill crowned by the town burial-ground. And then abruptly they were gone, leaving only the sound of the surf and the music of the crickets and the distant, ironically winking lighthouse.
She kept seeing them, side by side in the motor racing through the darkness, oblivious to all else in the world save their own happiness. Yes, something had gone away from her forever.... She felt a terrible, passionate envy that was like a physical pain, and all at once she knew that she was terribly alone standing in the darkness before the door of the old house.
She was roused by the sound of Anson’s voice asking, “Is that you, Olivia?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing out there?”
“I came out for some air.”