Anne lay very still. She did not cry. She knew better than that. Tears are for the young. She hid her convulsed face in her hands, and shuddered violently from time to time.
How long was she to bear it? How long was she to drag herself by sheer force through the days, endless hour by hour? How long was she to hate the dawn? How long was she to endure this intermittent agony, which released her only to return? Was there to be no reprieve from the invasion of this one thought? Was there no escape from this man? Was not her old friend the robin on his side? The meadowsweet feathered the hedgerow. The white clover was in the grass, together with the little purple orchid. Were they not all his confederates? Had he bribed the robin to sing of him, and the scent in the white clover against her cheek to goad her back to acute remembrance of him, and the pine-trees to speak continually of him?
"He is rich enough," said poor Anne to herself, with something between a laugh and a sob.
But he had not bribed the brook. Tormented spirits ere now have walked in dry places, seeking rest and finding none. But has any outcast from happiness sought rest by running water, and found it not?
CHAPTER IV
"I have not sinned against the God of Love."
—Edmund Gosse.
When Anne returned to the house an hour or two later she heard an alien voice and strident laugh through the open door of the drawing-room as she crossed the hall, and she crept noiselessly upstairs towards her own room. She felt as if she were quite unable to bear so soon again the strain of that small family party. But halfway up the stairs her conscience pricked her. Was all well in the drawing-room? She sighed, and went slowly downstairs again.
All was not well there.