All night she lay a broken thing hearing the banging and shunting of trains. And her feet were like stones. Now and again a kind of ague took her. She could not weep, could not think, could hardly even feel. There was in her no real anger against Louis. The waves of fiiry that overwhelmed her from time to time were all from the outside and inessential. What really concerned her was that the menace of death which had been with her all these months was now fulfilled in her. Louis was no more than the instrument in a proceeding as far beyond his own control as hers.

X

Neither then nor afterwards was Joanna able to account for her actions of the following day. They seemed merely automatic. There was no real life left in her.

At eight in the morning, having dozed a very little during the last hour, she dressed herself, and with that factitious access of spirits, rather lightheaded, which comes to some people as one of the phases before collapse, she paid her bill and left the hotel. Louis would send his message, or more probably would come himself. And he would find her gone. That was something.

She could not think of London, however, while he was still in Edinburgh. So she walked stupidly about, always carrying with her, her bag which grew heavier and heavier.

It occurred to her that she had better look for a room. She began accordingly to make inquiries wherever she saw a card in a window. But in the district where she happened to be wandering, lodgings were of the cheap, theatrical sort; and she fled time after time from the vision of a sordid, unmade bed, and an empty tumbler of the night before on the bed-side table covered with circular stains.

At length, returning to the other side of Princes Street, she found what she sought in a small and friendly temperance hotel. Here she dropped her bag with relief, then went out, bought a bunch of wall-flowers – dark red and yellow – which had caught her eye at a street corner earlier and put them in water on the dressing-table of her new quarters. A passionate gratitude welled in her for these warm, sweet flowers with their homely air. They were her only friends, and she wished for no others.