Then how steadily and how strangely the deathliness of fatigue went rippling along her arms, along her legs, and away! Here at least Aunt Perdy had been right. One thought wrongly of the body as of something single and upright. Truly it was no more than a handful of various weights strung loosely on a string.

Joanna knew that she was safe now from what had threatened her. Her body, still bereft, was safe. Her defeated brain was laved by the clear waves of nothingness. She lay and lay till time, for her, was not. Slowly her breathing altered. It grew deeper, milder, more regular, and at last in the sure knowledge of sleep she returned to her bed.

It was now that there sounded in her soothed ear a small, sweet forgotten voice of childhood. At Duntarvie, long ago, her bed had stood within hearing of the house cistern. Here in the same room with her, by a curious chance was the water tank of the hotel. It was hidden in a cupboard, and in the daytime she had only dully recognized a familiar presence by certain muffled thrummings and spoutings and sudden gushings. Through the night as yet she had marked no sound at all.

But now in this secret hour before dawn, when the rest of the world was asleep, and Joanna was waiting in quietness till sleep should come to her, the water began to speak. It started unaccountably out of the silence with exquisite precision.

Drip … dreep-dreep-dreep … drop, drop … dripeet, dripeeteet … drip-ipeet-ipeety! – went the tiny, silvern, interminable cadenza, so fine and clear and absolved that it was an ecstasy to hear – a keen ecstasy quite purged of any dross of excitement. Steadily the singing would go on for a bar or two, tone after perfect tone. Then like a rill that leaps under starlight it would scatter its drops in a spray of grace-notes. On it went, sometimes singing, sometimes speaking, modulating continually from one delicate, undreamed-of rhythm to another. And though it was a voice from childhood, Joanna had never truly heard it before. It was the still, small voice of a new birth, of a new life, of a new world. It was a new voice, but it was the oldest of all the voices. For it was the voice before creation, secure, unearthly, frail as filigree yet faithful as a star.

CHAPTER FOUR

I

She had slept, and in the train next day on her way to London she was still able to rest. Her body was weak but safe. After the alternation of sharp, riving pain and dull stupor which had been her existence for the last two days, this was almost happiness.