At the question he sprang up out of his armchair with the headlong haste of a young man. The movement upset a little table at his elbow; but he let the table lie. “By God, yes!” he shouted, reaching out to her with both hands. She shrank back a little, not from reluctance but from a sense of paralyzing inadequacy. “It’s I who am old now,” she thought with a shiver. “What--you really would come with me? The day after tomorrow?” she said. “I’d come with you today, if there was enough of it left to get us anywhere.” He stood looking at her, waiting for her to speak; then, as she remained silent, he slowly drew back a step or two. “Kate--this isn’t one of your jokes?” As she returned his look she was aware that her sight of him was becoming faintly blurred. “Perhaps it was, when I began. It isn’t now.” She put her hands in his. XXVIII. In the stillness of the sleeping house she sat up with a start, plucked out of a tormented sleep. “But it can’t be--it can’t be--it can’t be!” She jumped out of bed, turned on the light, and stared about her. What secret warning had waked her with that cry on her lips? She could not recall having dreamed: she had only tossed and fought with some impalpable oppression. And now, as she stood there, in that hideously familiar room, the silence went on echoing with her cry. All the excuses, accommodations, mitigations, mufflings, disguisings, had dropped away from the bare fact that her lover was going to marry her daughter, and that nothing she could do would prevent it. A few hours ago she had still counted on the blessed interval of time, the lulling possibilities of delay. She had kissed Anne goodnight very quietly, she remembered. Then it was eleven o’clock of the night before; now it was the morning of the day. A pitch-black winter morning: there would be no daylight for another three hours. No daylight--but the Day was here! She glanced at the clock. Half-past four. The longing seized her to go and look at Anne for the last time; but the next moment she felt that hardly a sight in the world would be less bearable. She turned back into her room, wrapped herself in her dressing-gown, and went and sat in the window. What did Fifth Avenue look like nowadays at half-past four o’clock of a winter morning? Much as it had when she had kept the same vigil nearly twenty years earlier, on the morning of her flight with Hylton Davies. That night too she had not slept, and for the same reason: the thought of Anne. On that other day she had deserted her daughter for the first time--and now it seemed as though she were deserting her again. One betrayal of trust had led inexorably to the other. Fifth Avenue was much more brilliantly lit than on that other far-off morning. Long streamers of radiance floated on the glittering asphalt like tropical sea-weeds on a leaden sea. But overhead the canopy of darkness was as dense, except for the tall lights hanging it here and there with a planetary glory.