"I hope," said Lotta, "that you don't think you have arrived at any conclusion. It is impossible to decide anything about life. It is possible only to live--sometimes."
They went to bed very early. The wind had risen to. a gale and screamed in the chimneys and the eaves.
Hardly had René sunk into sleep, the quick easy slumber of health and peace, than he was roused by a fearful din. Leaping out of bed, he ran to the window and opened it. The wind came rushing in upon his bare chest and made him gasp for breath. Out on the road was a crowd of men armed with rattles, tin cans, kettles, baths, which they banged and whirled in the air as they marched solemnly up the road to the next cottage. There they moved slowly up and down, making a terrible noise and chanting:
There's evil enough between wind and water Without your tumbling of the farmer's daughter. Do you hear Billy Bows behind the door? There's no honest girl shall be a whore, With a billy, billy, billy, Billy blow.
They kept this up for a couple of hours in the wind and the rain, until at last with three groans and hoots they broke up and trailed off into the darkness.
René asked Lotta next morning what they might be doing, and she told him that the man in the cottage was an unpopular character who had been annoying and molesting a girl in the village.
"That is public opinion. They wouldn't have minded if he had been a popular man, or a rich man. They would have blamed the girl in that case."
Lotta was staying on for a day or two. René took Cathleen back to London. He told her he was going to his work and Mitcham Mews and Ann.
"About the noise last night and the girl?"
"Yes. I think it's true. Ann will be blamed by her own class."
"I don't know. I'll tell you that when I have got things straight with her--if I ever do."
"I can wait, René," she said. "Time doesn't seem to matter now. Isn't Lotta splendid?"
They shook hands as they parted, and each promised to write.
Mais, hélas! quelle raison Te fait quitter la maison? . . . Et qu'est-ce que je puis faire Que je ne fasse pour toi?
DURING the three days of René's absence Ann did not speak to a soul. She found the comfort of mortification in reading the attorney's letter from Edinburgh. It made her feel hardly used, and that was pleasant. René had crept into her life under pretext of being at an end of his resources when he was incredibly rich. It was not fair: it was abominable. The grievance became such an obsession as to obscure her real dread and anxiety. In her almost crazy desire to defend herself against the alien power that was coming to him she tore up the letter and burned it. He would not know. She would keep him. She would get him to take her away. It was a good idea of Casey's. They would all go down into the country. Casey said there were cinemas in the country. Through the whole of the last night she sat brooding in the darkness. Every now and then she would pretend that he was there in the next room, in the bed, and she would cling to this pretense until she had deceived herself and could almost believe that she heard him there. Yes. He was stirring in his sleep as he often did. She would go into the room and run her hand over the pillows. And her disappointment was a relief. It would have been terrible to have found him there when she knew he was away. Where was he? Whom was he with? Why didn't that beast Kilner know, since it was all that beast's doing, that sly hulk with his sarcastic way of speaking and his eyes that looked at you as if you were some sort of animal. It must be Kilner who had got him away. She brooded herself into hatred.