Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/137

 "Because all the others are always deceiving me."

And then quite gently she allowed herself to be led across the moonlit patches of the dusty floor, down the stairs and back to her room. In the hall of the north wing they came suddenly upon the starched Miss Egan, all her starch rather melted and subdued now, her red face purple with alarm.

"I've been looking for her everywhere, Mrs. Pentland," she told Olivia. "I don't know how she escaped. She was asleep when I left. I went down to the kitchen for her orange-juice, and while I was gone she disappeared."

It was the old woman who answered. Looking gravely at Olivia, she said, with an air of confidence, "You know I never speak to her at all. She's common. She's a common Irish servant. They can shut me up with her, but they can't make me speak to her." And then she began to drift back again into the hopeless state that was so much more familiar. She began to mumble over and over again a chain of words and names which had no coherence.

Olivia and Miss Egan ignored her, as if part of her—the vaguely rational old woman—had disappeared, leaving in her place this pitiful chattering creature who was a stranger.

Olivia explained where it was she found the old woman and why she had gone there.

"She's been talking on the subject for days," said Miss Egan. "I think it's letters that she's looking for, but it may be nothing at all. She mixes everything terribly."

Olivia was shivering now in her nightdress, more from weariness and nerves than from the chill of the night.

"I wouldn't speak of it to any of the others, Miss Egan," she said. "It will only trouble them. And we must be more careful about her in the future."

The old woman had gone past them now, back into the dark room where she spent her whole life, and the nurse had begun to recover a little of her defiant confidence. She