She read on. Had Vere talent? Did her child possess what she had longed for, and had been denied? She strove to read critically, but she was too excited, too moved to do so. All necessary calm was gone. She was painfully upset. The words moved before her eyes, running upward in irregular lines that resembled creeping things, and she saw rings of light, yellow in the middle and edged with pale blue.
She pushed away the sheets of paper, got up and went again to the window. She must look at Vere once more, look at her with this new knowledge, look at her critically, with a piercing scrutiny. And she bent down as before, and moved a section of the blind, pushing it up.
There was no boat beneath her on the sea.
She dropped the blind sharply, and all the blood in her body seemed to make a simultaneous movement away from the region of the heart.
Vere was perhaps already in the house, running lightly up to the room. She would come in and find her mother there. She would guess what her mother had been doing.
Hermione did not hesitate. She crossed the room swiftly, opened the door, and went out. She reached her own room without meeting Vere. But she had not been in it for more than a minute and a half when she heard Vere come up-stairs, the sound of her door open and shut.
Hermione cleared her throat. She felt the need of doing something physical. Then she pulled up her blinds and let the hot sun stream in upon her.
She felt dark just then—black.
In a moment she found that she was perspiring. The sun was fierce—that, of course, must be the reason. But she would not shut the sun out. She must have light around her, although there was none within her.
She was thankful she had escaped in time. If she had not, if Vere had run into the room and found her there, she was sure she would have frightened her child by some strange outburst. She would have said or done something—she did not at all know what—that would perhaps have altered their relations irrevocably. For, in that moment, the sense of self-control, of being herself—so she put it—had been withdrawn from her.