Page:Glimpses of the Moon (Wharton 1922).djvu/131

Rh At length she dropped her hands, and staring from dry lids saw a rim of fire above the roofs across the Grand Canal. She sprang up, ran back into her room, and dragging the heavy curtains shut across the windows, stumbled over in the darkness to the lounge and fell among its pillows-face downward—groping, delving for a deeper night.

She started up, stiff and aching, to see a golden wedge of sun on the floor at her feet. She had slept, then—was it possible?—it must be eight or nine o'clock already! She had slept—slept like a drunkard—with that letter on the table at her elbow! Ah, now she remembered—she had dreamed that the letter was a dream! But there, inexorably, it lay; and she picked it up, and slowly, painfully re-read it. Then she tore it into shreds hunted for a match, and kneeling before the empty hearth, as though she were accomplishing some funeral rite, she burnt every shred of it to ashes. Nick would thank her for that some day!

After a bath and a hurried toilet she began to be aware of feeling younger and more hopeful. After all, Nick had merely said that he was going away for "a day or two." And the letter was not cruel: there were tender things in it, showing through the curt words. She smiled at herself a little stiffly in the glass, put a dash of red on her colourless lips, and rang for the maid.