The corners of the room were growing dusky, and there were sounds of mice nibbling in the cupboard beside her. The bells in the town ceased ringing, and a dreadful silence seemed to fall over everything. Presently one of the mice stole out of the cupboard, and passing close to the foot of Violet's chair, climbed up the cord of the canary bird's cage, and squeezing itself in through the bars, disappeared in a twinkling.
Even the lantern man had forgotten to come and light the lamp outside her window; and the pigeons had reluctantly deserted their posts on the sill outside, and retired to roost without their evening meal.
"If only I could get out of this chair; if only I could walk; if only some one would come and open the door." And poor Violet moved restlessly to and fro in her chair, and craned her neck to see beyond the strip of narrow blind which hid the opposite house from her view.
The window which looked across to the hill lay wide open, and every now and then a breeze came rushing in, which blew her hair softly about her face and refreshed her; but the hill itself lay now like a great black heap against the evening sky. No friendly moon was up, to frost the branches of the distant trees with silvery light, and only a few faint stars twinkled now and again through the gathering darkness.
Presently she grew quite desperate, and strove in the foolishness of her fear to free herself from the bands which held her fast in her chair. She clutched at the blind, and tried to drag it down; and she called aloud frantically to Madam Adler, to Evelina, to Ella, to any one, to come and help her. But no one answered her, and she sank back, tired out, on the pillows behind her.
Then some one in a neighbouring house began to sing, and she felt comforted. The first note of a human voice, which sounded not so far off, gave her some confidence, and she dragged herself up painfully and listened.
It was a song which she had heard before, but at first she could not remember the words. The air was intensely sad, for Evelina had sung it one night when Violet was lying awake in her bed, and she remembered that she had put her fingers in her ears that she might not hear the words; but now, with a strange eagerness, she leaned forward.
The woman was singing with all her heart. She scarcely touched the notes of the old piano on which she was accompanying herself; and by-and-by the words came out with a cruel clearness upon the evening air.
Violet knew now who it was. It was the woman who kept the little toy-shop a few doors off, and whose husband, Ella told her, had been killed in the war.
She had a little spinet, not very musical, on which Violet had often heard her play in the pleasant spring evenings before the war began; but, until this evening, the spinet had been silent for many a long day, and the woman's voice had been silent too. To-night it seemed as if she must cry out to some one,—