She went over and looked out. The old-fashioned sash window, too heavy to move without a pulley, was open as far as it would go. That is to say, the top half had been pulled right down behind the lower pane. Meade had therefore two thicknesses of glass to look through, and the mist beyond that again.

She put her hand to the pulley and raised both panes. Now the bottom half of the window was clear. But the mist was still there, white with the light of the unseen moon but quite impenetrable. She could see nothing at all. Leaning out over the sill, she could hear nothing either. The still misty night, the moon veiled, the house asleep, only Meade Underwood awake, brought her back from her happy dream to a world where Giles Armitage lay drowned beneath the sea.

She kneeled down by the window and stayed there, her elbows on the sill, her thoughts bitter and sad. There hadn’t been any sound at all. She had waked and lost her dream of Giles because she was a coward, because her nerves still played her false, startling her out of sleep with an echo of the crash which had roused them all three months ago in mid Atlantic. She ought to be over it by now, she ought to be well. She wanted to be at work, too busy to hear what she had heard that night or see what she had seen. Her ribs had mended and the broken arm was sound again. Hearts take longer to mend than bones. She would not have minded dying with Giles, but he had died alone, and she had waked in a hospital ward to hear that his life was gone and hers was left to her.

She kneeled there, bringing up her courage to meet an agony of depression, fighting it back inch by inch-“I shall be able to work soon, and then it will be better. They’ll let me join something. I’m doing half a day at those parcels now-that’s better than nothing. Everyone’s so kind, even Aunt Mabel-I wish I liked her better. But she’s been so kind. Only it’ll be much easier when I can get right away and not have people being sorry for me.”