Page:E Nesbit - Man and Maid (1906).djvu/107

 kissing a glove, a little creeping memory that came to sting. She trampled on it.

Next day Jane walked four miles to see a doctor and get a sleeping draught.

“You see,” she explained very earnestly, “I have some work to finish, and if I don’t sleep I can’t. And I must do it. I can’t tell you how important it is.”

The doctor gave her something in a bottle when he had asked a few questions, and she went back to the cottage to go on bearing what was left of the interminable, intolerable day.

That was the day when she set out the fair white writing paper, and the rosy blotting-paper, and the black ink and the black fountain pen, and sat and looked at them for hours and hours. She prayed for help—but no help came.

“I’m probably praying to the wrong people,” she said, when through the dusk the square of paper showed vague as a tombstone in twilit grass—“the wrong people—No, there are no tombstones in the sea—the wrong people. If St Anthony helps you to find things, and the other saints help you to be good, perhaps the dead people who used to write themselves are the ones to help one to write!”