"Then he 'd better get it off; I don't like it," said Jamie brusquely; "here they come—"
In came Angélique and Marie, Pierre the Great, and Pierre the Small, to bid us good night; it was their custom; and after the many "bonne-nuits" and "dormez-biens", they trooped out. We took our lighted candlesticks from the library table where Marie had placed them; Jamie snuffed out the fourteen low-burning lights in the sconces, drew ashes over the embers, put a large screen before the fire, and we went to our rooms.
Mine greeted me with an extra degree of warmth. Marie had made more fire; the air was frosty. I drew apart the curtains and looked out. There was only the blackness of night beyond the panes. I drew them to again; unlocked my trunk to take out merely what was necessary for the night, undressed and went to bed.
I must have lain there hours with wide open eyes; there was no sleep in me. Hour after hour I listened for a sound from somewhere; there was absolute silence within the manor and without. I had opened my window for air, and, as I lay there wide awake, gradually, without reason, in that intense silence, the various nightly street sounds of the great city, five hundred miles to the southward, began to sound in my ears; at first far away, then nearer and nearer until I heard distinctly the roar of the elevated, the multiplied "honk-honk" of the automobiles, the rolling of cabs, the grating clamor of the surface cars, the clang of the ambulance, the terrific clatter of the horses' hoofs as they sped three abreast to the fire, the hoarse whistle of tug and ferry; and, above all, the voices of those crying in that wilderness.
Again I felt that awful burden, that blackness of oppression, which was with me for weeks in the hospital—the result of the intensified life of the huge metropolis and the giant machinery that sustains it—and, feeling it, I knew myself to be a stranger even in the white walled room in the old manor house of Lamoral.
It must have been long, long after midnight when I fell asleep.
IV
There was a soft white light on walls and ceiling when I awoke. I recognized it at once: the reflection from snow. I drew aside both curtains and looked out.
"Oh, how beautiful!" I exclaimed, drawing long deep breaths of the fine dry air.