"Very well! That's what I'll do, then."

After this there was a period of quiet in which I assumed that my
husband was writing his letter. Then I heard a bell ring somewhere in
the corridor, and shortly afterwards there was a second voice in the
sitting-room, but I could not hear the words that were spoken. I suppose
it was Hobson's low voice, for after another short interval of silence
there came the thrum and throb of a motor-car and the rumble of
india-rubber wheels on the wet gravel of the courtyard in front of the
hotel.

Then my husband knocked at my door again.

"I've written that letter and Hobson is waiting to take it. Your father
will probably get it before he goes to bed. It will be a bad break on
the festivities he was preparing for the village people. But you are
still of the same mind, I suppose?"

I did not speak, but I rose and went over to the window. For some reason
difficult to explain, that reference to the festivities had cut me to
the quick.

My husband must have been fuming at my apparent indifference, and I felt
as if I could see him looking at me, passionate and proud.

"Between the lot of you I think you've done me a great injustice. Have
you nothing to say?"

Even then I did not answer.

"All right! As you please."

A few minutes afterwards I heard the motor-car turning and driving away.

The wind had fallen, the waves were rolling into the harbour with that
monotonous moan which is the sea's memory of a storm, and a full moon,
like a white-robed queen, was riding through a troubled sky.

THIRTY-EIGHTH CHAPTER

The moon had died out; a new day had dawned; the sea was lying as quiet
as a sleeping child; far out on the level horizon the sky was crimsoning
before the rising sun, and clouds of white sea-gulls were swirling and
jabbering above the rocks in the harbour below the house before I lay
down to sleep.

I was awakened by a hurried knocking at my door, and by an impatient
voice crying:

"Mary! Mary! Get up! Let me in!"

It was Aunt Bridget who had arrived in my husband's automobile. When I
opened the door to her she came sailing into the room with her new
half-moon bonnet a little awry, as if she had put it on hurriedly in the
dim light of early morning, and, looking at me with her cold grey eyes
behind their gold-rimmed spectacles, she began to bombard me with
mingled ridicule and indignant protest.

"Goodness me, girl, what's all this fuss about? You little