After a while the gong sounded for dinner.  I got up and lay on the bed.  The young waiter brought up some dishes on a tray.  I sent them down again.  Then time passed and again I heard voices on the floor below.

“Rough on that young peeress if Conrad has gone down, eh?”

“What peeress?”

“Don’t you remember—­the one who ran away from that reprobate Raa?”

“Ah, yes, certainly.  I remember now.”

“Of course, Conrad was the man pointed at, and perhaps if he had lived to come back he might have stood up for the poor thing, but now. . . .”

“Ah, well, that’s the way, you see.”

The long night passed.

Sometimes it seemed to go with feet of lead, sometimes with galloping footsteps.  I remember that the clocks outside seemed to strike every few minutes, and then not to strike at all.  At one moment I heard the bells of a neighbouring church ringing merrily, and by that I knew it was Christmas morning.

I did not sleep during the first hours of night, but somewhere in the blank reaches of that short space between night and day (like the slack-water between ebb and flow), which is the only time when London rests, I fell into a troubled doze.

I wish I had not done so, for at the first moment of returning consciousness I had that sense, so familiar to bereaved ones, of memory rushing over me like a surging tide.  I did not cry, but I felt as if my heart were bleeding.

The morning dawned dark and foggy.  In the thick air of my room the window looked at me like a human eye scaled with cataract.  It was my first experience of a real London fog and I was glad of it.  If there had been one ray of sunshine that morning I think my heart would have broken.

The cockney chambermaid came with her jug of hot water and wished me “a merry Christmas.”  I did my best to answer her.

The young waiter came with my breakfast.  I told him to set it down, but I did not touch it.

Then the cockney chambermaid came back to make up my room and, finding me still in bed, asked if I would like a fire.  I answered “Yes,” and while she was lighting a handful between the two bars of my little grate she talked of the news in the newspaper.

“It don’t do to speak no harm of the dead, but as to them men as ’ad a collusion with a iceberg in the Australier sea, serve ’em jolly well right I say.  What was they a-doing down there, risking their lives for nothing, when they ought to have been a-thinking of their wives and children.  My Tom wanted to go for a sailor, but I wouldn’t let him!  Not me!  ‘If you’re married to a sailor,’ says I, ’’alf your time you never knows whether you ’as a ’usband or ‘asn’t.’  ‘Talk sense,’ says Tom.  ’I am a-talking sense,’ says I, ‘and then think of the kiddies,’ I says.”

After a while I got up and dressed and sat long hours before the fire.  I tried to think of others beside myself who must be suffering from the same disaster—­especially of Martin’s mother and the good old doctor.  I pictured the sweet kitchen-parlour in Sunny Lodge, with the bright silver bowls on the high mantelpiece.  There was no fire under the slouree now.  The light of that house was out, and two old people were sitting on either side of a cold hearth.