Georgie showed a disposition to come into her room and ask her her opinion of “falling in love” over mutual hair-brushes, but Judith evaded the tentative suggestion.  By then she was feeling that the word was a meaningless string of four letters, and the thing she supposed it stood for as fantastic and far-off as the recurring fragment of a dream, which seems so vivid in the dreaming and is a broken kaleidoscope of ill-fitting colours on awaking.  She went to bed and slept soundly, better than she had done for months.

She was to wake to the old weight, half-joy, half-pain, but more and more she was to feel the new dread that she was growing out even of that, left in a dryness that belittled the past; but the periods of numbness once begun had to go on in spite of her, and with their bitterness was mingled at least the negative healing of indifference.

CHAPTER XII

GEORGIE

Georgie had been up to the village to post a very important letter—­so important that her hand stayed hesitant over the slit in the box for a moment or two while she made up her mind all over again.  Then, with a gasp, she pushed the letter through and heard it fall with a faint thud to the bottom of the box.  The last chance was still not gone, for the friendly old postmaster would have given it back to her if she had asked for it, but the mere noise it made in falling—­one of the most distinctive and irrevocable sounding in the world—­caused her to feel a lightening of the heart that meant satisfaction.  She turned and went away down the bare village street, past the last row of whitewashed slate-roofed cottages, with the dark clumps of myrtle or tamarisk by their doors, and then she struck off the hard, bleak road, where the wind sang mournfully in the insulators at every telegraph post, and made for the open moor.

It was one of those mood-ridden days of spring when the whole countryside changes in the passing of a cloud from pearly grey to a pale brightness unmarred by any dark note.  Even the cloud-shadows were no deeper than wine-stains as they trailed over the slopes; against the cold, clear blue of the sky the branches of the thorns seemed of pencilled silver—­their leaves were a rich green amid the colder verdure of the elders and the soft hue of the breaking ash leaves.  Ploughed lands were a delicate purple, and the pastures still held the pure emerald of the rainy winter, though paled by the quality of the light to a tone no deeper than that of the delicate young bracken fronds which were uncurling upon the moor.  Everywhere was lightness—­in all colour, in the wandering airs, in the texture of leaf and blade—­in Georgie’s soul as she went over the soft turf and hummed little tunes to herself.  She ran up a grassy peak crested with grey boulders and flung herself against them, half-leaning, half-standing, over a rough cool curve of grey granite, arms outstretched, eyes closed.