Company had come to the man below; they were making a great deal of very jolly noise. The candle guttered drearily; a reek of warm cabbage climbed up the stairway to her nostrils. She looked up on hearing a soft tapping--the black sky-light was spattered with silver tears, like a pall. She walked up and down, waiting and listening, everything taking more and more the quality of a dream wherein the most unnatural things grow ordinary. She had felt with a numbed sort of cowardly loathing that every moment brought her nearer to a black stream of realizing grief and remorse into which willy-nilly she must descend; but now it seemed in accordance with every known law that she should be here, destined to go on walking so forever, never arriving, nor anything ever changing. She heard herself say aloud in a light, indifferent tone, "He will never come. He will never come." For a moment she remembered Gregory, whose image seemed to rise out of the dim past: Gregory in the warm light of the hotel coffee-room, where dinner was set on a little table for three, dinner with wine-glasses of two shapes, and fruit and confectionery in crystal dishes. The thought worked upon her as a sweet smell in sea-sickness. All that had to do with Gregory seemed of negative importance; let him wait and wonder and worry. She felt hard-hearted towards him and all prosperous things. A burst of voices reached her through the floor; they were rough and hoarse, their mirth had turned to wrangling. It was so horribly lonely here! If they were suddenly possessed to climb the stairs, to burst in upon her! There was a crash of glass--she screamed; then a laugh--she shuddered--and the noise grew less. She breathed again, but, feeling her knees weaken, went back to the bed, and sat listening in fascination for the murmuring sounds to develop again into a quarrel. Suddenly, without the warning of gradually approaching sounds she had prepared herself for, she heard footsteps just outside. She knew them. An impulse to flee seized her. She looked about for a place to hide in, a place to get through, to jump from. She could not bear to see him, she felt as a murderess whose victim's ghost is upon her. His image flashed before her, pinched with hunger and cold, worn, embittered with disappointment, terrible with its long unrequited love turned to hatred--gray, with glassy eyes. She looked wildly, but she could not move. Besides, it was too late, a hand was on the door. As it opened, a deep stillness fell upon her, a suspension of all.