She held it fast an instant before letting it fall into the yawning slit. She liked holding it in her hand, because it was a link between her and all that lay behind that curtain of loneliness; because it was going to him. In a little while he would touch it, would wonder, perhaps, at the unknown hand, hat poor scribble—! She dropped it in and it went like her own life into the dark.
For awhile she hurried, fighting her choking terror of the emptiness that was left. Why was it worse now than it used to be? She had been in strange cities, she had been friendless.... And somewhere behind in the glitter that mocked the darkness there was still one person who would help her, if she asked help; who would be kind to her lavishly, without understanding. She did not ask herself why it was impossible to turn in her rudderless flight and appeal to the woman from whom she had tried to guard her heart. There was a gulf between her and Adelaide. Little by little the fear driving her seemed to fail, and all other emotions grew indistinct, crushed by an infinite weight of fatigue. At last she could not think, could not suffer. She only wanted to go to sleep.
*****
It was a frost in Leicestershire. There would be no hunting.
That first irrelevant thought struck Susan as she felt the sharpness of the air breathing in on her face. The narrow window above her head had been propped a little way open with a hair-brush, and the curtain that divided her bed from the next was agitated; she had a neighbour who was astir.
With her eyes shut the girl imagined the grass frozen white, and the branches silver; heard the rapping trot of a string of hunters exercising in the long road beneath the park.
But this was not Leicestershire; it was London, and she was lying in a narrow bed in a small square attic. At the foot stood a washing stand, with a jug and basin, at the head a chest of drawers. There was not room for a chair.
Was it last night she had followed a stranger bearing a candle up flights and flights of uncarpeted wooden stairs? The weariness of that pilgrimage obliterated her stupefied sense of relief when the kind, worn woman had consented to take her in, her absurd inclination to sink down on the chair in the passage and fall asleep. She had thought she would never, never cease climbing stairs.
She remembered now.
Lady Henrietta had asked her once, when she and Barnaby had run up for the day to London, to call on an old governess who was ill. "In a sort of lodging-house," she had said. "One of these places where women live in hutches and eat in the basement." And the dreariness of it had haunted her. Somehow she had found her way there again. The old governess was gone, but the manageress recalled her face. They would not have taken her in without luggage at an hotel.