black shiny rainy window, the room was desolate. More tears came to Adelaide. She went across and pulled the curtains. Then she took the Welsh counterpane off the bed and turned back the blankets neatly, dropping her tears onto the sheets. She stood looking about the room.
Then she saw that there was a letter lying on top of the chest of drawers. Her first thought was that Danby had come back while she was still weeping hysterically and had left a message for her. She moved over and pushed Danby’s electric razor aside. The envelope was addressed to Miss Lisa Watkin.
It was unsealed. Adelaide listened for a moment. Only rain. Then after another moment’s hesitation she pulled the letter out of the envelope.
My dear Lisa,
I am sorry to have behaved so badly in Brompton Cemetery and perhaps startled you. I am not much good at writing letters but I must write this one. I want you to know it’s serious. Not that I have any hope anyway, why should I have. But it’s not a light thing. You may find this incomprehensible. I’ve only seen you a few times. But oh God Lisa, please believe it’s serious, it’s terrible. I do love you and I do want to see you and get to know you and I ask you please to consider this as a serious possibility. I will behave very well and do anything you want. Don’t just blankly say there’s no point. How do you know there’s no point until you try? I know I’m nothing compared with you, but I love you terribly and one is not mistaken about something like this. I have only loved like this once before. It is quite different from ordinary trifling affections and just wanting to get into bed with people. I feel a sense of destiny here. You must listen to me, Lisa. That you may think badly of me (for instance because of what you saw that first time) and think I am a frivolous person somehow doesn’t matter. I am a frivolous person, but not about you, and if you attended to me at all you might be able to forgive me and you have already changed me. Don’t regard all this as drunken babbling or something. It is the heart speaking and one knows when that is happening. Please recognize and I dare to say respect the fact that I love you, and see me again, Lisa. You have got to. There is no way round this. I will write again and suggest a meeting. Please think of me seriously. I love you, Lisa, and everything else is utterly blotted out.
Your slave,
Danby
Adelaide put the letter back into the envelope and put the envelope back under the electric razor. She switched out the light and returned to her own room and locked the door. She lay rigid and tearless until the window began to lighten with the dawn.
19
Very quietly Miles opened the door of Lisa’s room in the darkness.
It was about two o’clock on Saturday morning. During the two previous days Miles had taken his meals, gone to the office, done his work, talked in an ordinary way to the two women. He had made his usual pithy comments on the morning news papers and departed punctually to catch his train returning equally punctually in the evening. But amid the old machinery of his life his inner heart was in a boiling seething ferment. He had watched Lisa closely. The physical space between them had taken on a new and terrifying significance. The near approach of hands at the breakfast table, the exchange of a book, the movement of a cup, an encounter on the stairs, these things were passages of anguish. The familiar house which he had called his home had disappeared. In its stead there was a structure of movements and views and distances which racked his body like an instrument of torture.
It was also impossible not to look and look. He stared at her compulsively and it seemed to him that she stared back. A magnetism which it would have been blinding agony to resist drew his eyes towards hers, compelled her eyes by his. He could not forgo these looks which were now so appallingly weighted with meaning. With a slightly giddy deliberation he refrained from varying the ordinary routine of his day. He made no attempt to be alone with her, and since they usually left home and returned at different times, and as Diana was always about in the house, where doors were left open to be called through and looked through, he had not been alone with her.
However there are communications which can be made and certainly made without speech. By the time Friday evening had been reached Miles knew that Lisa knew and he knew that she knew that he knew. He had still absolutely no idea of what she thought about it, and indeed, absorbed in observing the painful evolution of his own feelings, he had not yet very much considered this. He was moreover not yet prepared to admit that he had entered a disastrous situation. The experience of falling in love, or as it seemed here to Miles, of realizing that one is in love, is itself, however painful, also a preoccupying joy. It increases vitality and sense of self. And this rather black joy was still preventing Miles from looking ahead or indeed from making any plan whatsoever. He did reflect: she did not want to tell Diana about Danby. But that might be and doubtless was, just an effect of her general discretion and tactful reserve, since she could hardly have fore seen what the witnessing of that little drama was going to do to the sanity of her brother-in-law.
Late on Friday evening, just as the women, who went to bed earlier than Miles, were in course of retiring something did happen. Diana was talking to Lisa at the foot of the stairs. Miles was still in the drawing room, standing near the window which he had just been fastening. Lisa came back into the drawing room to fetch a book, and for a moment they were both out of sight from the hall. Miles stared at her. Lisa picked up the book and arrested her movement for just a second to look back at him. Miles made a gesture with his hands, a gesture of entreaty and surrender, whose meaning was quite unmistakable. Lisa looked at him blankly and returned back into the hall, answering a question of Diana’s.
Miles went up to his study, as he always did. Time passed. The agony became greater. At last, treading very softly, he went to Lisa’s door.
The room where Miles and Diana slept was on the same landing as Miles’s study. The room where Lisa slept was on a separate landing down some stairs. Miles was not afraid of waking Diana, who was a prompt and sound sleeper.
He did not knock on the door but turned the handle very quietly and stepped noiselessly through into the darkness of the room.
The intensely enclosed darkness and silence seemed for a moment to stifle him and he put his hand to his throat. The violent pounding of his heart was making him feel sick and faint. He stood still, releasing the doorhandle, trying to breathe normally. He could see nothing, but after a while he began to hear the soft sound of Lisa’s sleeping breath. He moved very quietly forward with hands outstretched, his feet questing carefully for obstacles. He could see the whiteness of the bed now and very dimly discern the shape of her head and the dark hair fanned out upon the pillow. She was lying on her back, one arm outstretched upon the counterpane. Miles put a hand out towards the bed. He was trembling so violently that his fingernails scratched the sheet with a tearing sound. Uttering a sighing groan he fell on his knees beside the bed. He could see her profile outlined against the window. He touched her hair.
”Oh! Miles!” She moved quickly, half sitting up.
Miles put his arms out gropingly. In a second she had put her arms round his neck and drawn his head violently against her breast.
Miles did not afterwards know how long they remained thus, quite motionless. Perhaps a long time. It was a moment of black blissful death. It was also a moment of absolute certainty.
”Oh God,” said Lisa.
”I love you, Lisa.”
”I know. I love you too.”
”Oh my darling-“
”I’m sorry, Miles.”
”Don’t be sorry. It’s wonderful.”
”I never thought you-Why suddenly now, Miles, what happened?”
”I don’t know. I feel I’ve loved you for years only I was blind to it. You were so necessary.”
”Yes, perhaps. But it wasn’t like this.”
”I know. This is sudden. And oh my God it’s violent, Lisa. I feel I shall die of it.”
”Was it something to do with Danby?”
”I’m a fool, a fool, Lisa. You’ve been so close to me for years. I took you for granted. I didn’t see my own
