“No, something else. Let me sit in your room, porter.”
She read the letter again and again, until the words seemed blurred and the lines irregular as a spider's web. Then she thought: “We can not part forever like this. I must see him again whatever happens. Perhaps he has not yet gone.”
It was now half-past eight and time to go on duty, but she went upstairs to Sister Allworthy and asked for an hour's further leave. The request was promptly refused. She went downstairs to the matron and asked for half an hour, only that she might see a friend away on a long journey, and that was refused too. Then she tightened her quivering lips, returned to the porter's room, fixed her bonnet on before the scratched pier-glass, and boldly walked out of the hospital.
It was now quite dark and the fashionable dinner hour of Belgravia, and as she hurried through the streets many crested and coroneted carriages drew up at the great mansions and discharged their occupants in evening dress. The canon's house was brilliantly lighted, and when the door was opened in answer to her knock she could see the canon himself at the head of his own detachment of diners coming downstairs with a lady in white silk chatting affably on his arm.
“Is Mr. Storm at home?”
The footman, in powdered wig and white cotton gloves, answered haltingly. “If it is—er—anything about the hospital, miss, Mr.—er—Golightly will attend.”
“No, it is Mr. Storm himself I wish to see.”
“Gorn!” said the footman, and he shut the door in her face.
She had an impulse to hammer on the door with her hand, and command the flunky to go down on his knees and beg her pardon. But what was the good? She had no time to think of herself now.
As a last resource she would go to Bishopsgate. How dense the traffic seemed to be at Victoria! She had never felt so helpless before.