"In there?" Bellamy nodded toward the bedchamber and, receiving a nod in reply, strode quickly to the door and threw it open.
The room was a pocket of darkness and, when the lights had been turned on, proved to be tenantless.
The nightly breeze from the hills was bellying the curtains at one of the windows that opened on the street. Lucinda ran to it and leaned out.
No sign of the car that by her order had been left standing before the side door, nearly an hour since....
XLII
Lucinda slept that night—and that she slept at all crossed her presentiment—but fitfully, in spells of profound and wasting lethargy broken by wretched watches of half-waking dread under the dominion of the incubus that agonized her dreams, that phantasm of the land-bird lost, spending its slender strength against the cruel vasts of night and sea and storm....
Toward morning exhaustion claimed her absolutely, sponging out every care, and for some hours her slumbers were unbroken. But she woke up as it were against her will, heavy of heart and without sense of having rested.
Sluggish resentment crawled in her mind, that she should feel so worn and old whose first moments after sleep were as a rule her happiest, when she would lie serene, luxuriating in whole refreshment and with normal optimism very like a child's looking forward to the day, making plans to fill in with small pleasures every hour that wasn't to be devoted to her work.
There was still the feel of immaturity in the day, the chilly souvenir of night which so frequently renders the mornings of Southern California sickly, before the sun finds strength enough to burn away the high fog that, like a thief in the dark, is wont to steal in after sundown from the sea.