Miss Keating said nothing. She was putting on her hat, and her mouth at the moment was closed tight over a long hat-pin. She drew it out slowly between her shut lips. Meeting Kitty's eyes she blinked.
"You needn't be sorry," said Kitty. "I've had things that you haven't."
Miss Keating turned to the looking-glass and put on her veil. Her back was toward Kitty. The two women's faces were in the glass, the young and the middle-aged, each searching for the other. Kitty's face was tearful and piteous; it pleaded with the other face in the glass, a face furtive with hate, that hung between two lifted arms behind a veil.
Miss Keating's hands struggled with her veil.
There was a knock at the door, and Miss Keating started.
"It's the men for your boxes. Come into my room and say good bye."
"I prefer to say good bye here, if it's all the same to you. Good bye."
"You won't even shake hands with me? Well, if you won't--why should you?"
"I am holding out my hand. If you won't take it----"
"I must let those men in," said Miss Keating. "You are not going to make a scene?"
"I? Oh Lord, no. You needn't mind me. I'll go."
She went into her own room and flung herself, face downward, on to her pillow, and slid by the bedside, kneeling, to the floor.
At eight o'clock Mrs. Tailleur was not to be found in her room, or in any other part of the hotel. By nine Lucy was out on the Cliff-side looking for her. He was not able to account for the instinct that told him she would be there.
The rain had ceased earlier in the evening. Now it was falling again in torrents. He could see that the path was pitted with small, sharp footprints. They turned and returned, obliterating each other.
At the end of the path, in the white chamber under the brow of the Cliff, he made out first a queer, irregular, trailing black mass, then the peak of a hood against the wall, and the long train of a woman's gown upon the floor, and then, between the loops of the hood, the edge of Mrs. Tailleur's white face, dim, but discernible. She sat sideways, leaning against the wall, in the slack, childlike attitude of exhausted misery.
He came close. She did not stir at the sound of his feet trampling the slush. Her eyes were shut, her mouth open; she breathed, like a child, the half-suffocated breath that comes after long crying. He stood looking at her, tongue-tied with pity. Every now and then her throat shook like a child's with guileless hiccoughing sobs.