CHAPTER I:  SIX O’CLOCK

i

Six o’clock was striking.  The darkness by Westminster Bridge was intense; and as the tramcar turned the corner from the Embankment Jenny craned to look at the thickly running water below.  The glistening of reflected lights which spotted the surface of the Thames gave its rapid current an air of such mysterious and especially sinister power that she was for an instant aware of almost uncontrollable terror.  She could feel her heart beating, yet she could not withdraw her gaze.  It was nothing:  no danger threatened Jenny but the danger of uneventful life; and her sense of sudden yielding to unknown force was the merest fancy, to be quickly forgotten when the occasion had passed.  None the less, for that instant her dread was breathless.  It was the fear of one who walks in a wood, at an inexplicable rustle.  The darkness and the sense of moving water continued to fascinate her, and she slightly shuddered, not at a thought, but at the sensation of the moment.  At last she closed her eyes, still, however, to see mirrored as in some visual memory the picture she was trying to ignore.  In a faint panic, hardly conscious to her fear, she stared at her neighbour’s newspaper, spelling out the headings to some of the paragraphs, until the need of such protection was past.

As the car proceeded over the bridge, grinding its way through the still rolling echoes of the striking hour, it seemed part of an endless succession of such cars, all alike crowded with homeward-bound passengers, and all, to the curious mind, resembling ships that pass very slowly at night from safe harbourage to the unfathomable elements of the open sea.  It was such a cold still night that the sliding windows of the car were almost closed, and the atmosphere of the covered upper deck was heavy with tobacco smoke.  It was so dark that one could not see beyond the fringes of the lamplight upon the bridge.  The moon was in its last quarter, and would not rise for several hours; and while the glitter of the city lay behind, and the sky was greyed with light from below, the surrounding blackness spread creeping fingers of night in every shadow.

The man sitting beside Jenny continued to puff steadfastly at his pipe, lost in the news, holding mechanically in his further hand the return ticket which would presently be snatched by the hurrying tram-conductor.  He was a shabby middle-aged clerk with a thin beard, and so he had not the least interest for Jenny, whose eye was caught by other beauties than those of assiduous labour.  She had not even to look at him to be quite sure that he did not matter to her.  Almost, Jenny did not care whether he had glanced sideways at herself or not.  She presently gave a quiet sigh of relief as at length the river was left behind and the curious nervous tension—­no more lasting than she might have felt at seeing a man balancing upon a high window-sill—­was relaxed.