at her
own empty bed. He reposed; he slept. But she did not repose nor sleep.

She drew aside one of the blinds, and as she did so she could feel the
steady slight current of cold air entering the room from the window
open at the top. The street seemed to be full of daylight. The dawn
had been proceeding in its vast secrecy and was now accomplished.
She drew up the blind slowly, and then the gas-flame over the
dressing-table seemed so pale and futile that she extinguished it,
from a sort of pity. In silence she pulled out the iron bolts in the
window-sash that had been Mrs. Maldon's device for preventing burglars
from opening further a window already open a little, thus combining
security with good hygiene. Louis had laughed at these bolts, but Mrs.
Maldon had so instilled their use into both Rachel and Mrs. Tams that
to insert them at night was part of the unchangeable routine of the
house. Rachel gently pushed up the lower sash and looked forth.

Bycars Lane, though free from mud, was everywhere heavily bedewed. The
narrow pavement glistened. The roofs glistened. Drops of water hung
on all the edges of the great gas-lamp beneath her, which was still
defying the dawn. The few miserable trees and bushes on the vague
lands beyond the lane were dripping with water. The sky was low and
heavy, in scarcely distinguishable shades of purplish grey, and Bycars
Pool, of which she had a glimpse, appeared in its smooth blackness to
be not more wet than the rest of the scene. Nothing stirred. Not the
tiniest branch stirred on the leafless trees, nor a leaf on a grey
rhododendron-bush in a front garden below. Every window within sight
had its blind drawn. No smoke rose from any house-chimney, and the
distant industrial smoke on the horizon hung in the lower air, just
under the clouds, undecided and torpid. The wet air was moveless, and
yet she could feel it impinging with its cool, sharp humidity on her
cheek.

The sensation of this contact was delicious. She was surrounded, not
by the slatternly Five Towns landscape and by the wretchedness of the
familiar bedroom, but by the unanswerable, intimidating, inspiring
mystery of life itself. A man came hurrying with a pole out of the
western vista of the lane, and stopped in front of the gas-lamp, and
in an instant the flame was reduced to a little fat worm of blue, and
the man passed swiftly up the lane, looking straight ahead with bent
shoulders, and was gone. Never before had Rach