"What does it matter? What does anything in this ghastly world matter? I'm frightened, Septimus, horribly frightened. I daren't go up by myself. Oh! Come!"
Her voice broke on the last word. Saint Anthony would have yielded; also his pig. Septimus handed her out of the cab, and telling the cabman to wait, followed her through the already opened front door of the Mansions up to her flat. She let herself in with her latchkey and showed him into the drawing-room, turning on the electric light as he entered.
"I'll go and wake Edith," she said. "Then we can have some breakfast. The fire's laid. Do you mind putting a match to it?"
She disappeared and Septimus knelt down before the grate and lit the paper. In a second or two the flame caught the wood, and, the blower being down, it blazed fiercely. He spread his ice-cold hands out before it, incurious of the futile little room whose draperies and fripperies and inconsiderable flimsiness of furniture proclaimed its owner, intent only on the elemental need of warmth. He was disturbed by the tornadic entrance of Emmy.
"She's not here!" she exclaimed tragically. Her baby face was white and there were dark shadows under the eyes which stared at him with a touch of madness. "She's not here!"
"Perhaps she has gone out for a walk," Septimus suggested, as if London serving-maids were in the habit of taking the air at eight o'clock on a foggy morning.
But Emmy heard him not. The dismaying sense of utter loneliness smote her down. It was the last straw. Edith, on whom she had staked all her hopes of physical comfort, was not there. Overstrained in body, nerves, and mind, she sank helplessly in the chair which Septimus set out for her before the fire, too exhausted to cry. She began to speak in a queer, toneless voice:
"I don't know what to do. Edith could have helped me. I want to get away and hide. I can't stay here. It's the first place Zora will come to. She mustn't find me. Edith has been through it herself. She would have taken me somewhere abroad or in the country where I could have stayed in hiding till it was over. It was all so sudden—the news of his marriage. I was half crazy, I couldn't make plans. I thought Edith would help me. Now she has gone, goodness knows where. My God, what shall I do?"
She went on, looking at him haggardly, a creature driven beyond the reticence of sex, telling her inmost secret to a man as if it were a commonplace of trouble. It did not occur to her distraught mind that he was a man. She spoke to herself, without thought, uttering the cry for help that had been pent within her all that awful night.
The puzzledom of Septimus grew unbearable in its intensity; then suddenly it burst like a skyrocket and a blinding rain of fire enveloped him. He stood paralyzed with pain and horror.