"Asleep?" he said.
Helen and Rachel started to think that some one had been sitting near
to them unobserved all the time. There were legs in the shadow. A
melancholy voice issued from above them.
"Two women," it said.
A scuffling was heard on the gravel. The women had fled. They did not
stop running until they felt certain that no eye could penetrate the
darkness and the hotel was only a square shadow in the distance, with
red holes regularly cut in it.
Chapter IX
An hour passed, and the downstairs rooms at the hotel grew dim and
were almost deserted, while the little box-like squares above them were
brilliantly irradiated. Some forty or fifty people were going to bed.
The thump of jugs set down on the floor above could be heard and the
clink of china, for there was not as thick a partition between the rooms
as one might wish, so Miss Allan, the elderly lady who had been playing
bridge, determined, giving the wall a smart rap with her knuckles. It
was only matchboard, she decided, run up to make many little rooms of
one large one. Her grey petticoats slipped to the ground, and, stooping,
she folded her clothes with neat, if not loving fingers, screwed her
hair into a plait, wound her father's great gold watch, and opened the
complete works of Wordsworth. She was reading the "Prelude," partly
because she always read the "Prelude" abroad, and partly because
she was engaged in writing a short _Primer_ _of_ _English_
_Literature_--_Beowulf_ _to_ _Swinburne_--which would have a paragraph
on Wordsworth.
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