Louie pricked up her ears. "Oh? Alone?" she said quickly.
"Yes. Coming down Putney Hill."
"Yes, she said she was going to take a walk," Louie remarked.
But to herself she cried with conviction: "I knew it—I knew it—I knew it!"
For the rest of the evening she was lost in her own thoughts. Miss Cora Mayville worked a hand sewing machine; Miss Dot and her Registrar played bézique at a separate table; other nurses, in print aprons or cloaked and bonneted, came and went; but Louie sat and gazed into the fire. When spoken to she smiled mechanically and then resumed her gazing. There was no more continuity in her thoughts than there was in the shape of the flames that illumined her grey eyes. Roy appeared in them for a moment or two—she had seen Roy's name in The Gazette a week before—and then Roy was supplanted by Burnett Minor. Her old French governess at Trant popped up for no particular reason, and then she too gave place to Mr. Mackie. She heard Buck saying again, "That little girl"—and then came a wrangle between Dot and her Registrar. In the adjoining kitchen she heard sounds of frying, and then somebody came in to lay the table for supper. The gas rose and whistled as the stove in the next room was turned off. The three night nurses came down. Louie had her gruel where she sat, and at half-past nine went upstairs again. She got into bed, and dreamed that night that she was dancing with Mr. Jeffries again at the breaking-up party. Her hand lay like a willow leaf in his. "You understand," he was saying to her; "it's no good hiding things from you; you've got the key of it all. It had to be somebody, and you'd left. There was only Kitty for it. You see what an ignominious thing you escape. Don't tell me how degrading it is; I know it; but I'd do it a thousand times for the woman I loved and meant to marry."
Louie knew, in her dream, who that was.
Then she awoke with a start. The street lamp outside, shining through the venetian blinds, made long bars of light on the walls and ceiling. The hot-water bottle at her feet was cold. She heard the creaking of Dot's bed in the little dressing-room adjoining, and the minute ticking of her watch on the table by her bed-head. But what had woke her had been the sound of her own reply, in her dream, to Mr. Jeffries.
"You'll shuffle Kitty off," she had replied, still dancing with him, "but I should have found a way to keep you."
Then, with a deep sigh, she turned and went to sleep again.
III