Page:Lolly Willowes - 1926.djvu/84

 That it did so, Laura knew well. That was why she disliked having to come back; autumn boded her no good, and it was hard that by a day's train-journey she should lose almost a month's reprieve. Obediently looking along the tarnishing vistas, she knew that once again she was in for it.

What It was exactly, she would have found hard to say. She sometimes told herself that it must be the yearly reverberation of those miserable first months in London when her sorrow for her father's death was still fresh. No other winter had been so cold or so long, not even the long cold winters of the war. Yet now her thoughts of Everard were mellowed and painless, and she had long ago forgiven her sorrow. Had the coming of autumn quickened in her only an experienced grief she would not have dreaded it thus, nor felt so restless and tormented.

Her disquiet had no relevance to her life. It arose out of the ground with the smell of the dead leaves: it followed her through the darkening streets; it confronted her in the look of the risen moon. "Now! Now!" it said to her: and no more. The moon seemed to have torn the leaves from the trees that it might stare