Page:Restless Earth.djvu/195
She prepared the lunch, moving about the kitchenette with fierce resolution, snatching up the necessary culinary implements as though she were snatching lethal weapons with which to defend herself against physical attack. She made an unusual clatter in the sink, so that Grace smiled as she pictured her friend’s incompetence.
She would not be cheated of love, she told the bubbling cabbage. She would not! Not for forty Graces—even though all were blind!
At noon she summoned enough resolution to go into the sick-room and collect the morning tea things. She smoothed her apron nervously, patted her hair into place, and practised a suitable expression of sympathy before the cheap mirror in the door of one of the cupboards, and set out on her simple errand with a fluttering heart. It was not an easy thing to fight a sick woman.
She halted abruptly on the threshold of Grace’s room.
Grace, half-asleep, was speaking quietly to herself. Patricia thought that she prayed.
The words were spoken very softly and for some moments Patricia did not catch their drift; then she made out a certain rhythm, and the sadness in the low voice forced itself into her unwilling consciousness. Presently she caught two lines of the poem which Grace repeated—the final lines upon which Grace raised her voice a little.
I ne’er had known how dark these shadows be.”
Silence followed, an intense silence in which Patricia fancied she heard a sob.
She stood very still, her hand raised against the door-face. Sun-light, flooding through the opened front door, enveloped her ard warmed her. She turned her head slowly and gazed at the varied tints of the sunlit trees, the red of the roofs, the blue of the sky, the gleam of the sea, the glory of