In the corridor upstairs, flooded with moonlight from a window at the end, Hilary stood listening again.  The only sound that came to him was the light snoring of Miranda, who slept in the bathroom, not caring to lie too near to anyone.  He went to his room, and for a long time sat buried in thought; then, opening the side window, he leaned out.  On the trees of the next garden, and the sloping roofs of stables and outhouses, the moonlight had come down like a flight of milk-white pigeons; with outspread wings, vibrating faintly as though yet in motion, they covered everything.  Nothing stirred.  A clock was striking two.  Past that flight of milk-white pigeons were black walls as yet unvisited.  Then, in the stillness, Hilary seemed to hear, deep and very faint, the sound as of some monster breathing, or the far beating of muffed drums.  From every side of the pale sleeping town it seemed to come, under the moon’s cold glamour.  It rose, and fell, and rose, with a weird, creepy rhythm, like a groaning of the hopeless and hungry.  A hansom cab rattled down the High Street; Hilary strained his ears after the failing clatter of hoofs and bell.  They died; there was silence.  Creeping nearer, drumming, throbbing, he heard again the beating of that vast heart.  It grew and grew.  His own heart began thumping.  Then, emerging from that sinister dumb groan, he distinguished a crunching sound, and knew that it was no muttering echo of men’s struggles, but only the waggons journeying to Covent Garden Market.

CHAPTER XIV

A WALK ABROAD

Thyme Dallison, in the midst of her busy life, found leisure to record her recollections and ideas in the pages of old school notebooks.  She had no definite purpose in so doing, nor did she desire the solace of luxuriating in her private feelings—­this she would have scorned as out of date and silly.  It was done from the fulness of youthful energy, and from the desire to express oneself that was “in the air.”  It was everywhere, that desire:  among her fellow-students, among her young men friends, in her mother’s drawing-room, and her aunt’s studio.  Like sentiment and marriage to the Victorian miss, so was this duty to express herself to Thyme; and, going hand-in-hand with it, the duty to have a good and jolly youth.  She never read again the thoughts which she recorded, she took no care to lock them up, knowing that her liberty, development, and pleasure were sacred things which no one would dream of touching—­she kept them stuffed down in a drawer among her handkerchiefs and ties and blouses, together with the indelible fragment of a pencil.

This journal, naive and slipshod, recorded without order the current impression of things on her mind.

In the early morning of the 4th of May she sat, night-gowned, on the foot of her white bed, with chestnut hair all fluffy about her neck, eyes bright and cheeks still rosy with sleep, scribbling away and rubbing one bare foot against the other in the ecstasy of self-expression.  Now and then, in the middle of a sentence, she would stop and look out of the window, or stretch herself deliciously, as though life were too full of joy for her to finish anything.