“You see she’s only got an uncle and aunt to leave,” explained Hugh, turning to his sister. “She’s a very lonely little person.”
“Not now,” said Alice, her voice full of content.
Before she had been with them two days, Anne had found herself filled with a passionate longing to return to her quiet home. To get back to the shelter in which she was not reminded twenty times an hour that she “didn’t count.”
She was amazed at the violence of her own emotions.
Every glance exchanged by the married lovers, every word of love, every caress, stabbed her afresh.
She had never before known what it was to feel acutely, and the suffering bewildered her. She was afraid of it. She wanted desperately to escape from herself, this new self which seemed all torn and bleeding.
There was a hunted look in her eyes like that of a starving and desperate animal. She shuddered at them sometimes when they met her suddenly in the glass. One evening, unable to bear the sight of their endearments, she had gone early to her room, pleading a headache. She groped her way to the window, in the dark, and kneeling down beside it, looked out upon the sea.
Every few minutes, a flash from the lighthouse on the cliffs momentarily illumined the still water. Far out, lights moved on the prow of passing ships. She could hear the wash and murmur of the waves, as they broke lazily on the pebbly shore.
For a long time she knelt there immovable, the sound of the sea lulling her into a sort of painless trance, till the hum of voices below gradually filtered to her senses. The evening was so warm that Hugh and his wife were sitting in the garden. At first, numbed and half conscious in mind, she scarcely heeded the murmur of talk, but finally a sentence in a man’s voice reached her consciousness.