The instant they were gone I brought up, from between the sheets, a scrap of paper—the scrap. I had taken it with me to bed. All night long, it seemed, I had held it in my hand, clutched between my fingers. I had thought of it the moment I supposed myself to have an idea of Audrey’s meaning; and, feeling it there, had realised how close a neighbour it had been while I had slept. It was all crumpled. I smoothed it out, and looked. The writing had grown faint; so faint as to suggest that the writer must have used ink of a very evanescent quality. Already, here and there, the words could scarcely be deciphered.
But the sentence was finished!
How, while I had slept, the finish had been arrived at, or by whom, I could not tell. The result was unmistakable. My doom stared me in the face; my forebodings were realised; the meaning of what I had seen in Audrey’s eyes, heard in her voice, was made quite plain.
“Your wish shall be gratified until to-morrow.”
“To-morrow” had been the missing word—that was, to-day. My wish was to be gratified until to-day, which meant that all the gratification I was to receive—so far as that particular wish was concerned—I had already had. What was my wish exactly? I should not have liked to have had to answer the question on my oath. I had been talking pretty wildly at the time! But, so far as I could remember, I wished that all men—every man—might fall in love with me at sight. As, lying there, in cold blood—metaphorically, in very cold blood, indeed!—I endeavoured to recall it, as accurately as I could, what a singular wish it seemed, to say the very least!
And it had been gratified? And now it was done with? Dear! dear! what a very short span of enjoyment had been allotted me. What a very small result the boon which had been conferred had ended in. Was that the meaning of the feeling I was conscious of—that I had returned again to what I was? It certainly was true that I was oppressed by an apprehension, which was near akin to fear, that since last night something had been lost, that something had gone from me, which I had when I laid down to sleep—gone, never to return. What could it be? It was not that I was ill, or tired, or—as I had pretended to Audrey—even cheap. It was nothing half so commonplace.
I got out of bed, and, as I did so, I felt that virtue had gone from me; life, that ichor of the gods which had been in my veins last night instead of blood. I had hit it—I was as one of the gods—the writer of the sentence on that scrap of paper alone knew how—and was again but mortal. Between sleeping and waking, I had come down the Olympian hill, slung down, rather, been kicked down, perhaps, amid the jeers and jesting of the rightful inhabitants; and at the very, very foot was once more—Norah O’Brady.
I needed not the assurance of the mirror. Had I done so, I had it, beyond all possibility of controverting. The face I saw in it was the one I had always seen; not the one that had seemed to blaze at me yester afternoon. The light had gone from the eyes; the flare, a mere glimpse of which—as, somehow, I had known—would set the most sluggish blood in masculine veins flaming as with fire; and, with it, all had gone. There was but left the plain, uninteresting, undistinguished, unintellectual face of overgrown Norah O’Brady.
I dressed. How shabby my things did seem, unusually shabby, even for me. Ill-shaped, ill-fitting, with about them, every one, that exasperating suggestion of having been intended for someone else. Always, everything I had, seemed to shout at me, with furious grievance, that it might have looked presentable if only it had been worn by a creature different entirely to me. If they had only let me choose my own things, and, regardless of what was, or was not, the mode, have permitted me to clothe myself in the garments in which I looked least awkward; at any rate, my actual deficiencies might not have been quite so obtrusive. But, in continual parodies of the fashions of the moment—which went very well with them, but, oh! so horribly with me—what a fright they made me look.