I passed in review my maidenhood, my marriage, and my love, and told myself that the darkest days of my loneliness in London had hitherto been relieved by one bright hope.  I had only to live on and Martin would come back to me.  But now I was utterly alone, I was in the presence of nothingness.  The sanctuary within me where Martin had lived was only a cemetery of the soul.

“Why?  Why?  Why?” I cried again, but there was no answer.

Thus I passed my Christmas Day (for which I had formed such different plans), and I hardly knew if it was for punishment or warning that I was at last compelled to think of something besides my own loss.

My unborn child!

No man on earth can know anything about that tragic prospect, though millions of women must have had to face it.  To have a child coming that is doomed before its birth to be fatherless—­there is nothing in the world like that.

I think the bitterest part of my grief was that nobody could ever know.  If Martin had lived he would have leapt to acknowledge his offspring in spite of all the laws and conventions of life.  But being dead he could not be charged with it.  Therefore the name of the father of my unborn child must never, never, never be disclosed.

The thickening of the fog told me that the day was passing.

It passed.  The houses on the opposite side of the square vanished in a vaporous, yellow haze, and their lighted windows were like rows of bloodshot eyes looking out of the blackness.

Except the young waiter and the chambermaid nobody visited me until a little before dinner time.  Then the old actress came up, rather fantastically dressed (with a kind of laurel crown on her head), to say that the boarders were going to have a dance and wished me to join them.  I excused myself on the ground of headache, and she said: 

“Young women often suffer from it.  It’s a pity, though!  Christmas night, too!”

Not long after she had gone, I heard, through the frequent tooting of the taxis in the street, the sound of old-fashioned waltzes being played on the piano, and then a dull thudding noise on the floor below, mingled with laughter, which told me that the old boarders were dancing.

I dare say my head was becoming light.  I had eaten nothing for nearly forty hours, and perhaps the great shock which chance had given me had brought me near to the blank shadowland which is death.

I remember that in some vague way there arose before me a desire to die.  It was not to be suicide—­my religion saved me from that—­but death by exhaustion, by continuing to abstain from food, having no desire for it.

Martin was gone—­what was there to live for?  Had I not better die before my child came to life?  And if I could go where Martin was I should be with him eternally.

Still I did not weep, but—­whether audibly or only in the unconscious depths of my soul—­more than once I cried to Martin by name.