just as she invariably protests that she does not need the extra gas which
the porter offers to light for her, and sits on there, hearing nothing
further, except an occasional remark on the weather which the porter
exchanges with a messenger whom he will send off suddenly, when he notices
the time, to put some customer's wine on the ice; so, having declined
Francoise's offer to make me some tea or to stay beside me, I let her go
off again to the servants' hall, and lay down and shut my eyes, and tried
not to hear the voices of my family who were drinking their coffee in the
garden.

But after a few seconds I realised that, by writing that line to Mamma, by
approaching--at the risk of making her angry--so near to her that I felt I
could reach out and grasp the moment in which I should see her again, I
had cut myself off from the possibility of going to sleep until I actually
had seen her, and my heart began to beat more and more painfully as I
increased my agitation by ordering myself to keep calm and to acquiesce in
my ill-fortune. Then, suddenly, my anxiety subsided, a feeling of intense
happiness coursed through me, as when a strong medicine begins to take
effect and one's pain vanishes: I had formed a resolution to abandon all
attempts to go to sleep without seeing Mamma, and had decided to kiss her
at all costs, even with the certainty of being in disgrace with her for
long afterwards, when she herself came up to bed. The tranquillity which
followed my anguish made me extremely alert, no less than my sense of
expectation, my thirst for and my fear of danger.

Noiselessly I opened the window and sat down on the foot of my bed; hardly
daring to move in case they should hear me from below. Things outside
seemed also fixed in mute expectation, so as not to disturb the moonlight
which, duplicating each of them and throwing it back by the extension,
forwards, of a shadow denser and more concrete than its substance, had