Behold her then, one warm Friday night of June, retiring to bed at ten o’clock after a day of virtue and housewifery. Aunt Adela was away for the week-end: and after turning out the dining-room with Maud Ann; impressing her idea of chervil salad (acquired from sundry student festivals in forsaken Rue Honorine) upon Aunt Adela’s severely British cook; entertaining the Vicarage, that always mistook at-home days, with tea and small-talk; and playing double-dummy, grimly, with Gran’papa all the long light beckoning evening, she felt that she was at last and indeed a grown-up lady; but that as long as she had her Saturdays with Justin she could bear it. Behold her further, producing from the bottom of her hat-box a most private store of candles (Aunt Adela did not approve of young people reading in bed) washing out her newest blouse and ironing it then and there with the spirit iron that Mrs. Cloud had given her in Italy: and thereafter, tucked up in bed, absorbed in a _chronique scandaleuse_, with plates, of the thrush family (order Passeres), not to mention their cousins the warblers and the white-throats, and their collaterals the tits and the finches and the pipits and the shrikes, and so leave her, at last, in the dazed middle of a sentence, to sleep and the shifting pageant of her dreams. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XVIII Laura was awakened by a soft warmth upon her cheek, a touch that might have been a kiss or a drifting feather or her kitten’s tentative paw, but was, when she lifted lazy hands to it, no more than a beam of sunshine, a finger-tip of morning, thrust in between thick hangings to rouse a votary. She was out of bed in an instant, barefooted and clear-eyed, paying her vows in deep breaths of pure pleasure, while the hoarse jingle of the curtain rings, as she pulled them apart, attuned like a clash of cymbals to the choruses of the birds. Early as it was, the dawn, dewy, startled, fugitive, had disappeared and the perfect day spread itself before her, arrogantly, from hill to hill, a peacock trailing splendours of blue and green and gold. Already earth-line and sky-line were melting into one, and the distant valleys and the little red-capped villages were half hidden in a quivering haze of heat. The breeze, tiny and half asleep, was burdened with the scents of a hundred fields and woods and gardens. The church clock, chiming five, sang seconds to the treble of the larks and in the roses at her elbow the bees boomed out their bass. And the sunlight, like the Spirit of God, brooded over the beautiful land.