ome in, he went into her room.

She was sitting at the table by the window playing patience, and she
stared over her shoulder at him with tearless eyes. But all the windows
were flung open to let out misery, and she had lit several candles, as
well as the electric light; and winged things that had risen from the
marshes to visit this brightness died in those candle-flames without
intervention from her who would at ordinary times try to prevent the
death of anything. She wore nothing over her nightgown, and her lilac
and gold kimono lay in the middle of the floor. Men who were lost in the
bush stripped themselves, he had often heard it said; and he had seen
panic-stricken women on the deck of a foundering ship throw off their
coats. She had turned back to her cards immediately, and he had not
spoken, but in some way he knew that she fully understood. "Take those
books off the armchair and sit down," she ordered in her rough, soft
voice.

For some time he sat there, while over and over again she shuffled and
dealt and played her game and started another at a speed which dazzled
his eyes; until she rose and said indifferently, "Let's go to bed. It
must be past four." There was an upward inflection in her naming of the
hour that showed she believed it later than she said, that she felt that
this long agony must have brought her quite close to the dawn, but she
had not dared to say so for fear of the disappointment which she knew
followed always on her imagining of brighter things. But it was not yet
three. "I can't think why we're sitting up like this," she continued
scornfully, and her face crumpled suddenly as she fell sideways into his
arms, crying, "Richard! Richard!" His heart seemed to break in two. He
held her close and kissed her and comforted her, and carried her over to
the bed, entreating her to lie quietly and try to forget and sleep. "But
I have so many things to remember," she reminded him. Turning her face
away from him, and drawing the bedclothes about her chin, she began to
talk very rapidly about the intense memories that pricked her like a
thousand thorns. But at the sound of Roothing Church clock striking, so
far off and so feebly that it told no hour but merely sweetly reminded
the ear of time, she rolled over again and looked at him, smilingly,
glowingly, sadly. "Ah, darling!" she said. "It is very late. Perhaps if
you hold my hand I will drop off to sleep now." But it was he that had
slept....

And