An intolerable restlessness seized on her. She began to range blindly, aimlessly, to and fro. More than once she knocked against some angle or outstanding piece of furniture, bruising herself; but she was hardly sensible of pain. At last, treading upon the trailing fronts of her pleated négligé, she stumbled, fell her length, face downward, and lay exhausted for a time; then slowly dragging herself into a sitting position, she remained there, massed together stupidly, upon the floor—while, through the large, well-ordered, soberly luxurious house, the clocks chimed the hours and half-hours, to be answered by the chime of the stable clock out of doors.
As the night drew toward morning the lightning became faint and infrequent behind the fir-trees in the west, for the drought still held and the refreshment of rain would not be yet. But in the gray of the dawn a cool breathing of wind came up from the sea. Then, for a minute or so, the great woodland stirred, finding its lost voice; and the tree-tops swayed, singing together to hail the sun-rising and the coming day.
The cool draught of air sweeping in at the still open window aroused Joanna somewhat from her stupor. In the broadening light she looked about her. The room was in disorder—chairs pushed aside, a table thrown down, well-bound books, fragments of a gold and glass bowl, sprigs of lemon verbena and fading roses, the wallet in which she kept Adrian Savage's letters lying open, alongside its contents, scattered broadcast upon the ground.
Joanna stared at these treasured possessions apathetically. She put up her hands to push back her hair, which hung down in heavy strands over her face and shoulders. Her fingers felt sticky. They pricked and smarted. She examined them. The nails were nicked and jagged, in places the tips were raw.
"I will wait until they have healed," she said half aloud in her thin, toneless voice, "then I will write to Adrian and ask him if it is true. But I must wait till they are healed, I think. Now I had better sleep. There is nothing else left for me to do."
She staggered to her feet, walked unsteadily across the intervening space and threw herself, unkempt and half-dressed as she was, upon the fine embroidered linen sheets and delicate lace coverlet of the satinwood bed.
CHAPTER IV
"COME UNTO THESE YELLOW SANDS"
"A thousand times welcome, my dear Savage!" Anastasia Beauchamp cried, taking Adrian's hand in both hers and looking up at him affectionately from beneath a broad-brimmed brown hat crowned by a positive vineyard of purple and white glass grapes and autumn foliage, the whole inwrapped cloudily in a streaming blue gauze veil. "You have played the good Samaritan quite long enough in my opinion, and it's high time you bestowed some attention upon the rest of us, though we are neither insane nor conspicuously immoral. And here we all are, that's to say, all of us who matter, in this really quite tidy, comfortable hotel, plus the amiable family Bernard, my devoted, despised little Byewater and his compatriot Lenty B. Stacpole—note the inevitable transatlantic initial, I beseech you! Clever, excellent fellows both of them, though a trifle slight temperamentally. And here, to complete our circle, you arrive as the God in the Car."
Anastasia's smile bore effective testimony to her appreciation of Adrian's handsome looks and gallant bearing.