fifteen minutes…. They’re almost hammering the door down—for God’s sake go and find out if they’ve come because of Papa, I beg of you.”
And he went hastily, still preserving a kind of dignity as he stepped along gingerly in his bath-robe and thin pyjamaed legs. And when he got to the door, there was no one, nothing there. The street outside was bare and empty, the houses along the street dark and hushed with their immense and still attentiveness of night and silence and the sleepers, the trees were standing straight and lean with their still young leafage—and he came back again growling surlily.
“Ah-h, there’s no one there! You didn’t hear anything!… You imagined the whole thing!”
And for a moment her eyes had a dull appeased look, she plucked at her large cleft chin and said in an abstracted tone: “Ah-hah!… Well, come on back to bed, honey, and get some sleep.”
“Ah, get some sleep!” he growled, scowling angrily as he took off his robe—and scuffed the slippers from his feet. “What chance do I have to get any sleep any more with you acting like a crazy woman half the time?”
She snickered hoarsely and absently, still plucking at her chin, as he lay down beside her; she kissed him, and put her arms around him with a mothering gesture.
“Well, I know, Hugh,” she said quietly, “you’ve had a hard time of it, but some day we will get away from it and live our own life. I know you didn’t marry the whole damned family—but just try to put up with it a little longer: Papa has not got long to live, he’s all alone over there in that old house—and she can’t realize—she doesn’t understand that he is dying—she’ll never wake up to the fact until he’s gone! I lie here at night thinking about it—and I can’t go to sleep… I get funny notions in my head.” As she spoke these words the dull strained look came into her eyes again, and her big-boned generous face took on the warped outline of hysteria—“You know, I get queer.” She spoke the word in a puzzled and baffled way, the dull strained look becoming more pronounced—“I think of him over there all alone in that old house, and then I think they’re coming for me—” she spoke the word “they” in this same baffled and puzzled tone, as if she did not clearly understand who “they” were—“I think the telephone is ringing, or that someone is coming up the steps and then I hear them knocking at the door, and then I hear them talking to me, telling me to come quick, he needs me—and
