Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/268

240 sleep seemed more impossible. In the stagnant air her head felt hot, her limbs feverish. She longed to jump out of bed and throw open the window, and made as if to do so, but hesitated, fearing the sound might waken the sleeping man beside her. But the thought of movement made her restless, and, slipping cautiously out on to her feet, she took her watch from the little table beside her and peered at it until she made out that the hands indicated five-and-twenty minutes to three.

Nearing the light, she revealed herself a lean, spare woman, with the leathery skin of the lean, and with hair now touched with grey, which grew sparsely and with no attempt at flourish or ornament, on the nape of an anxious neck. For the rest, a woman agitated and agitating, a woman worn with the fret of a single idea.

Five-and-twenty minutes to three! A clock downstairs somewhere in the great silent house struck the half-hour, and Mrs. Rathbourne, with one of those parentheses of the mind which occur in nervous crises, found herself wondering if her watch had gained since she set it right by the station clock at Sheffield. The journey South since they had received that startling telegram summoning them to town had seemed, indeed, a vague blur, varied only by the remembrance of fields splashed with yellow advertisements of divers infallible cures, of a quarrel between her husband and a porter about a bag, and later by the din and roar of the crowded streets and the flare of dingy lights which danced by in procession as the hansom dashed through London from King's Cross.

They had been too late. Too late! After four and a half hours' incessant prayer to Providence—a Providence of whom she had asked and expected so few boons of late that she should be permitted to be in time. They were too late! Had not the thud, thud, thud of the train said the ugly words in that dreary journey past flying factory-chimneys, scudding hedges, and vanishing jerry-built suburbs?