JENNY lay awake in a darkness so intense, so thick, so material that her effort to repulse it produced an illusion of a suffocating fabric desperately torn. What ivory cheeks were hidden by the monstrous gloom, what sparkling eyes were quenched in the dry mouth of night!
"Oh, morning, morning," she moaned. "Come quickly, oh, do come quick."
Far away in the blackness a cock crowed. She from London did not understand his consolation. Trewhella, sleeping soundly as he was wont to sleep on market nights, did not stir to the appeal. Jenny lay sobbing.
"What's it all for?" she asked. Then sleep, tired of love's cruelty, sent rosy dreams to comfort her, and in the morning, when she woke, her husband was gone from her side. It was a morning of moist winds and rich November sunlight, of pattering leaves and topaz lights, full of sea-gulls' wings and the cawing of rooks.
A little sister stood by the end of the bed.
"Oh, get in beside me," Jenny cried.
And whatever else was mad and bad, there would always be that little sister.