He went into the hall with her, and to the top of the stairs for the privilege of carrying her candlestick, and he only left her at the end of the corridor out of which her room opened.
She did not ring for her maid, preferring solitude to that young person’s attendance. She did not want to be worried with elaborate hair-brushing or ceremonies of any kind. She was thoroughly exhausted with the alternations of emotion of which her life had been made up of late, and she fell asleep almost as soon as her head touched her pillow.
The bedroom was over the drawing-room. Her last look from the open casement had shown her the reflection of the lights below on the terrace. She was near enough to have spoken out of the window to her husband, had she been so minded. She could picture him sitting at the table at the corner window, in his thoughtful attitude, his head bent over his book, one knee drawn up nearly to his chin, one arm hanging loosely across the arm of his low easy-chair. She had watched him thus many a time, completely absorbed in his book.
She slept as tranquilly as an infant, and her dream-wanderings were all in pleasant places—with him, always with him; confused after the manner of all dreams, but with no sign of trouble.
What was this dream about being with him at Woolwich where they were firing a big gun? A curious dream! She had been there once with her father to see a gun drawn—but she had never seen one fired there,—and now in her dream she stood in a crowd of strange faces, fronting the river, and there was a long grey ironclad on the water—a turret ship—and there came a flash, and then a puff of white smoke, and the report of a gun, short and sharp, not like the roar of a cannon by any means, and yet her dream showed her the dark sullen gun on the grey deck, the biggest gun she had ever seen.
She started up from her pillow, cold and trembling. That report of the gun had seemed so real and so near, that it had awakened her. She was wide awake now, and pushed back her loose hair from her eyes, and felt under her pillow for her watch, and looked at it in the dim light of the night-lamp on the table by her bed.
“A quarter to one.”
She had left the drawing-room a few minutes after ten. It was long for Godfrey to have sat reading alone; but he was insatiable when he had a new book that interested him.
She got up and put on her slippers and dressing-gown, prepared to take him to task for his late hours. She was not alarmed by her dream, but the sound of that sharp report was still in her ears as she lighted her candle and went down into the silent house.
She opened the drawing-room door, and looked across to the spot where she expected to see her husband sitting. His chair was empty. The lamp was burning just as she had left it hours ago, burning with a steady light under the green porcelain shade, but he was not there.