St. Pancras clock struck two. But there was no sense of night in the soft wide air; pouring in now more strongly at the open casement, rattling its fastening gently, rhythmically, to and fro, sounding its two little notes. It was the _west_ wind. Of _course_ she was not tired and there was no sense of night. She hurried to be in bed in the darkness, breathing it in, listening to the little voice at the window. Here was part of the explanation of her evening. Again and again it had happened; the escape into the tireless unchanging centre; when the wind was in the west. Michael had been hurt when she had told him that the west wind brought her perfect happiness and always, like a sort of message, the certainty that she must remain alone. But it was through him that she had discovered that it transformed her. It was an augury for tomorrow. For the way of the wind tonight, its breath passing through her, recalled, seeming exactly to repeat, that wonderful night of restoration when, for the only time, he had been away from London. It was useless to deplore the seeming cruelty. The truth was forced upon her, wafted through her by this air that washed away all the circumstances of her life. CHAPTER III She was inside the dark little hall, her luggage being set down in the shadows by the brisk silent maid. At the sight of the wide green staircase ascending to the upper world, the incidents of the journey, translated as she drove to the house into material for conversation, fell away and vanished. The thud of the swing door, the flurry of summer skirts threshed by flying footsteps; Alma hurrying to meet her.... It was folly; _madness_; to flout the year's fatigue by coming here to stay, instead of going away with friends also tired and seeking holiday.... With the first step on the yielding pile of the stair-carpet she forgot everything but the escape from noise and gloom and grime. She was going up for four endless weeks into the clean light streaming down from above. This time there should be no brisk beginning. She would act out Alma's promise to accept her as an invalid deaf mute. There was so much time that fatigue was an asset, the shadow against which all this brightness shone out. But Alma was not welcoming an invalid. There she stood, at the end of her rush, daintily jigging from foot to foot, in a delicate frilly little dress; heading the perspective of pure white and green, surfaces and angles sharp in the east light coming through the long casement. She checked the bright perspective with the thought in her dress, the careful arrangement of her softly woven pile of bright hair, the afternoon's excitement, from which she had rushed forth, shining through her always newly charming little pointed square face. "Shall I labour up the rest of the stairs, or sit down here and burst into tears?"