'd hear you. May, don't go
to sleep. Promise you won't go to sleep."

They pushed the bedstead back against the ribbons and forget-me-nots.
Then Jenny, summoning every tradition of pride, every throb of
determination, kissed May and ran to the lonely Gothic room, where the
flame of the solitary candle burned so still and shapely in the
breathless night. She undressed herself in a frenzy. It was like falling
into a river to enter those cold linen sheets and, worse, to lie there
with pulses thudding and breast heaving under a bravery of new pink bows
and ribbons. It could not be long now. She sat up in bed thinking to tap
on the wall; but the tapestried headpiece muffled the sound. May,
however, heard and rapped her answer.

"To-morrow," vowed Jenny, "I'll slit those unnatural curtains with my
scissors so as I can tap easily."

Then down the passage she heard her husband's tread. He was still
whistling that tune, more softly, indeed, but with a continuous
reiteration that was maddening. Round the door his shadow slipped
before him. Jenny hid beneath the bed-clothes, breathing faster than a
trapped bird. She heard his movements slow and dull and heavy,
accompanied by the whistling, the endless damnable whistling. Then the
lights went out and, as if he walked on black velvet, Trewhella stole
nearer to the bed.

Chapter XXXVII: _Columbine in the Dark_

Jenny lay awake in a darkness so intense, so thick, so material that her
effort to repulse it produced an illusion of a suffocating fabric
desperately torn. What ivory cheeks were hidden by the monstrous gloom,
what sparkling eyes were quenched in the dry mouth of night!

"Oh, morning, morning," she moaned. "Come quickly, oh, do come quick."

Far away in the blackness a cock crowed. She from London did not
understand his consolation. Trewhella, sleeping soundly as he was wont
to sleep on market nights, did not stir to the appeal. Jenny lay
sobbing.

"What's it all for?" she asked. Then sleep, tired of love's cruelty,
sent rosy dreams to comfort her, and in the morning, when she woke, her
husband was gone from her side. It was a morning of moist winds and rich
November sunlight, of pattering leaves and topaz lights, full of
sea-gulls' wings and the cawing of rooks.

A little sister stood by the end of the bed.

"Oh, get in beside me," Jenny cried.

And whatever else was mad and bad, there would always be that little
sister.

Chapter XXXVIII: _The A