She covered her face with both hands: there was a noise like thunder in her brain.
She heard the door close sharply in the hall below.
This was the end.
CHAPTER XXII
She felt a trifle weak. In her ears there lingered a dull, confused sensation, like the echo of things still falling. Something had gone very wrong with the scheme of nature. Even beneath her feet, now, the floor seemed unsteady, unreliable.
A half-darkness dimmed her eyes; she laid one slim hand on the sofa-back and seated herself, fighting instinctively for consciousness.
She sat there for a long while. The swimming faintness passed away. An intense stillness seemed to invade her, and the room, and the street outside. And for vast distances beyond. Half hours and hours rang clearly through the silence from the mantel-clock. So still was the place that a sheaf of petals falling from a fading rose on the piano seemed to fill the room with ghostly rustling.
This, then, was the finish. Love had ended. Youth itself was ending, too, here in the dead silence of this lamplit room.