Kitty was crying.
"I must let those men in," said Miss Keating. "You are not going to make a scene?"
"I? Oh Lord, no. You needn't mind me. I'll go."
She went into her own room and flung herself, face downward, on to her pillow, and slid by the bedside, kneeling, to the floor.
CHAPTER IX
AT eight o'clock Mrs. Tailleur was not to be found in her room, or in any other part of the hotel. By nine Lucy was out on the Cliff-side looking for her. He was not able to account for the instinct that told him she would be there.
The rain had ceased earlier in the evening. Now it was falling again in torrents. He could see that the path was pitted with small, sharp footprints. They turned and returned, obliterating each other.
At the end of the path, in the white chamber under the brow of the Cliff, he made out first a queer, irregular, trailing black mass, then the peak of a hood against the wall, and the long train of a woman's gown upon the floor, and then, between the loops of the hood, the edge of Mrs. Tailleur's white face, dim, but discernible. She sat sideways, leaning against the wall, in the slack, childlike attitude of exhausted misery.
He came close. She did not stir at the sound of his feet trampling the slush. Her eyes were shut, her mouth open; she breathed, like a child, the half-suffocated breath that comes after long crying. He stood looking at her, tongue-tied with pity. Every now and then her throat shook like a child's with guileless hiccoughing sobs.