Now Janet was getting quieter, Mrs. Pettifer determined to go down and make a cup of tea, the first thing a kind old woman thinks of as a solace and restorative under all calamities.  Happily there was no danger of awaking her servant, a heavy girl of sixteen, who was snoring blissfully in the attic, and might be kept ignorant of the way in which Mrs. Dempster had come in.  So Mrs. Pettifer busied herself with rousing the kitchen fire, which was kept in under a huge ’raker’—­a possibility by which the coal of the midland counties atones for all its slowness and white ashes.

When she carried up the tea, Janet was lying quite still; the spasmodic agitation had ceased, and she seemed lost in thought; her eyes were fixed vacantly on the rushlight shade, and all the lines of sorrow were deepened in her face.

‘Now, my dear,’ said Mrs. Pettifer, ’let me persuade you to drink a cup of tea; you’ll find it warm you and soothe you very much.  Why, dear heart, your feet are like ice still.  Now, do drink this tea, and I’ll wrap ’em up in flannel, and then they’ll get warm.’

Janet turned her dark eyes on her old friend and stretched out her arms.  She was too much oppressed to say anything; her suffering lay like a heavy weight on her power of speech; but she wanted to kiss the good kind woman.  Mrs. Pettifer, setting down the cup, bent towards the sad beautiful face, and Janet kissed her with earnest sacramental kisses—­such kisses as seal a new and closer bond between the helper and the helped.

She drank the tea obediently.  ‘It does warm me,’ she said.  ’But now you will get into bed.  I shall lie still now.’

Mrs. Pettifer felt it was the best thing she could do to lie down quietly and say no more.  She hoped Janet might go to sleep.  As for herself, with that tendency to wakefulness common to advanced years, she found it impossible to compose herself to sleep again after this agitating surprise.  She lay listening to the clock, wondering what had led to this new outrage of Dempster’s, praying for the poor thing at her side, and pitying the mother who would have to hear it all tomorrow.

Chapter 16

Janet lay still, as she had promised; but the tea, which had warmed her and given her a sense of greater bodily ease, had only heightened the previous excitement of her brain.  Her ideas had a new vividness, which made her feel as if she had only seen life through a dim haze before; her thoughts, instead of springing from the action of her own mind, were external existences, that thrust themselves imperiously upon her like haunting visions.  The future took shape after shape of misery before her, always ending in her being dragged back again to her old life of terror, and stupor, and fevered despair.  Her husband had so long overshadowed her life that her imagination could not keep hold of a condition in which that great dread was absent; and even his absence—­what was it? only a dreary vacant flat, where there was nothing to strive after, nothing to long for.