CHAPTER VI
THE next day it rained, fitfully at first, at the will of a cold wind that dragged clouds out of heaven. A gleam of sunshine in the afternoon, then wild rain driven slantwise by the gusts; and now, at five o'clock, no wind at all, but a straight, soaking downpour.
The guests at the Cliff Hotel were all indoors. Colonel Hankin and his wife were reading in a corner of the lounge. Mr. Soutar, the clergyman, was dozing over a newspaper by an imaginary fire. The other men drifted continually from the bar to the billiard-room and back again.
Mrs. Tailleur and Lucy were sitting in the veranda, with rugs round them, watching the rain, and watched by Colonel and Mrs. Hankin.
Jane had gone into the drawing-room to write letters. There was nobody there but the old lady who sat in the bay of the window, everlastingly knitting, and Miss Keating isolated on a sofa near the door.
Everybody in the hotel was happy and occupied, except Miss Keating. Her eyes followed the labour of Miss Lucy's pen, watching for the stroke that should end it. She had made up her mind that she must speak to her.
Miss Keating was subject to a passion which circumstances were perpetually frustrating. She desired to be interesting, profoundly, personally interesting to people. She disliked publicity partly because it reduced her to mournful insignificance and silence. The few moments in her life which counted were those private ones when she found attention surrendered wholly to her service. She hungered for the unworn, unwearied sympathy of strangers. Her fancy had followed and fastened on the Lucys, perceiving this exquisitely virgin quality in them. And now she was suffering from an oppression of the nerves that urged her to a supreme outpouring.
Miss Lucy seemed absorbed in her correspondence. She felt that Miss Keating's eyes were upon her, and as she wrote she planned a dexterous retreat. It would, she knew, be difficult, owing to Miss Keating's complete occupation of the sofa by the door.
She had made that lady's acquaintance in the morning, having found her sitting sad and solitary in the lounge. She had then felt that it would be unkind not to say something to her, and she had spent the greater part of the morning saying it. Miss Keating had tracked the thin thread of conversation carefully, as if in search of an unapparent opportunity. Jane, aware of the watchfulness of her method, had taken fright and left her. She had had an awful feeling that Miss Keating was about to bestow a confidence on her; somebody else's confidence, which Miss Keating had broken badly, she suspected.
Jane had finished her letters. She was addressing the envelopes. Now she was stamping them. Now she was crossing the room. Miss Keating lowered her eyes as the moment came which was to bring her into communion with the Lucys.