What should she do?
Crawl home, creep into her hole, and lie there stricken! At Paddington
she found a train just starting and got in. There were other people
in the carriage, business men from the city, lawyers, from that--place
where she had been. And she was glad of their company, glad of the
crackle of evening papers and stolid faces giving her looks of stolid
interest from behind them, glad to have to keep her mask on, afraid of
the violence of her emotion. But one by one they got out, to their cars
or their constitutionals, and she was left alone to gaze at darkness and
the deserted river just visible in the light of a moon smothered behind
the sou'westerly sky. And for one wild moment she thought: 'Shall I open
the door and step out--one step--peace!'
She hurried away from the station. It was raining, and she drew up her
veil to feel its freshness on her hot face. There was just light enough
for her to see the pathway through the beech clump. The wind in there
was sighing, soughing, driving the dark boughs, tearing off the leaves,
little black wet shapes that came whirling at her face. The wild
melancholy in that swaying wood was too much for Gyp; she ran, thrusting
her feet through the deep rustling drifts of leaves not yet quite
drenched. They clung all wet round her thin stockings, and the rainy
wind beat her forehead. At the edge, she paused for breath, leaning
against the bole of a beech, peering back, where the wild whirling wind
was moaning and tearing off the leaves.
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