To-night she wondered with a kind of terror whether that terrible sleeplessness which had ended by making her feel almost lightheaded was coming back.
She turned away from the window, and, getting into bed again, tried to compose her limbs into absolute repose, as the doctor had advised her to do. And then, just as she was mercifully going to sleep, there floated in, through the open window, a variant on a doggerel song she had last heard in Egypt:—
"The angels sing-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling,
They've got the goods for me.
The bells of hell ring ting-a-ling-a-ling
For you, as you shall see."
Enid Crofton sat up in bed. She felt suddenly afraid—horribly, desperately afraid. As is often the case with those who have drifted away from any form of religion, she was very superstitious, and terrified of evil omens. During the War she had been fond of going first to one and then to another of the fashionable sooth-sayers.
They had all agreed as to one thing—this was that her husband would die, and of course she had thought he would be killed at the Front. But he had come through safe and sound, and more—more hateful than ever.
One fortune-teller, a woman, small, faded, commonplace-looking, yet with something sinister about her that impressed her patrons uncomfortably, had told Enid Crofton, with a curious smile, that she would have yet another husband, making the third. This had startled her very much, for the woman, who did not even know her name, could only have guessed that she had been married twice. Enid Crofton was not given to making unnecessary confidences. With the exception of her sister-in-law, none of the people who now knew her were aware that Colonel Crofton had been her second husband.
She lay down again, and in the now dying firelight, fixed her eyes on the chintz square of the window curtain nearest to her. She shut her eyes, but, as always happens, there remained a square luminous patch on their retinas. And then, all at once, it was as if she saw, depicted on the white, faintly illuminated space, a scene which might have figured in one of those cinema-plays to which she and her house-mate, during those happy days when she had lived in London, used so often to go with one or other of their temporary admirers.
On the white, luminous background two pretty little hands were moving about, a little uncertainly, over a window-ledge on which stood a row of medicine bottles. Then, suddenly the two pretty hands became engaged in doing something which is done by woman's hands every day—the pouring of a liquid from one bottle into another.
Enid Crofton did not visualise the owner of the hands. She had no wish to do so, but she did see the hands.
Then there started out before her, with astonishing vividness, another little scene—this time with a man as central figure. He was whistling; that she knew, though she could not hear the whistling. It was owing to that surprised, long-drawn-out whistling sound that the owner of the pretty hands had become suddenly, affrightedly, aware that someone was there, outside the window, staring down, and so of course seeing the task on which the two pretty little hands were engaged.