“I suppose they’d say it was a punishment,” she whispered.  “They’d like to think it was.”

After that she stayed a long time silent, swaying gently while her candle flickered, her head full of a kind of formless musing.  Then she rose from the bed and took her candle so that she could see her face in the small mirror upon the dressing-table.  The candle flickered still more in the draught from the open window; and Jenny saw her breath hang like a cloud before her.  In the mirror her face looked deadly pale; and her lips were slightly drawn as if she were about to cry.  Dark shadows were upon her face, whether real or the work of the feeble light she did not think to question.  She was looking straight at her own eyes, black with the dilation of pupil, and somehow struck with the horror which was her deepest emotion.  Jenny was speaking to the girl in the glass.

“I shouldn’t have thought it of you,” she was saying.  “You come out of a respectable home and you do things like this.  Silly little fool, you are.  Silly little fool.  Because you can’t stand his not loving you ... you go and do that.”  For a moment she stopped, turning away, her lip bitten, her eyes veiled.  “Oh, but he does love me!” she breathed. “Quite as much ... quite as much ... nearly ... nearly as much....”  She sighed deeply, standing lone in the centre of the room, her long, thin shadow thrown upon the wall in front of her.  “And to leave Pa!” she was thinking, and shaking her head. “That was wrong, when I’d promised.  I shall always know it was wrong.  I shall never be able to forget it as long as I live.  Not as long as I live.  And if I hadn’t gone, I’d never have seen Keith again—­never!  He’d have gone off; and my heart would have broken.  I should have got older and older, and hated everybody.  Hated Pa, most likely.  And now I just hate myself....  Oh, it’s so difficult!” She moved impatiently, and at last went back to the mirror, not to look into it but to remove the candle, to blow it out, and to leave the room in darkness.  This done, Jenny drew up the blind, so that she could see the outlines of the roofs opposite.  It seemed to her that for a long distance there was no sound at all:  only there, all the time, far behind all houses, somewhere buried in the heart of London, there was the same unintermittent low growl.  It was always in her ears, even at night, like a sleepless pulse, beating steadily through the silences.

Jenny was not happy.  Her heart was cold.  She continued to look from the window, her face full of gravity.  She was hearing again Keith’s voice as he planned their future; but she was not sanguine now.  It all seemed too far away, and so much had happened.  So much had happened that seemed as though it could never be realised, never be a part of memory at all, so blank and sheer did it now stand, pressing upon her like overwhelming darkness.  She thought again of the bridge, and the striking hours; the knock, the letter, the hurried ride; she remembered her supper and the argument with Emmy; the argument with Alf; and her fleeting moods, so many, so painful, during her time with Keith.  To love, to be loved:  that was her sole commandment of life—­how learned she knew not.  To love and to work she knew was the theory of Emmy.  But how different they were, how altogether unlike!  Emmy with Alf; Jenny with Keith....