She stumbled frantically along the passage. From the room shared by the land-girls came a flood of light, flowing out across the passage. Alice was sitting beside the lamp, darning a stocking.
Muriel looked at her with wonder. People were still darning stockings then? What a funny way Alice's hair grew back from her ears, with little silvery tufts along her neck. You could see them in the lamplight quite distinctly. What had she come for? Oh, the matches.
"Please, Alice, have you any matches?"
Alice looked up. "My! What a start you gave me! Matches? No. I had to borrow Mrs. Todd's! Why don't you get Connie's? She bags all my matches."
On then to her own room she must go. Hours, interminable hours stretched between her and the horrible nightmare of Ben's voice. Her own matches lay on the candlestick by her bed where she had left them. She lit the candle with shaking fingers, then ran again down the long corridor. The draught plucked at her candle flame; it fluttered ruddily within the pink screen of her hand.
She came back to Connie's room.
"Ben! Ben! Where are you?"
She set the candle down by the disordered bed. The little flame shook itself, quivered and then stood gallantly upright, showing the flower-decked walls, the coarse white counterpane, all heaped and crumpled, and Ben's white face—blank and passive, staring at her from beside the mantelpiece.
"Where's that letter?" asked Muriel.
As though in a trance he came forward and handed her a sheet of flimsy paper, pencil written. She glanced at it.