Martin, tell me where you are.I'll go to you anywhere.Martin, where are you? Where are you?"It may not have been a vocal cry; perhaps she made no sound, but she waited, there on her knees, hearing very clearly the bells ringing for evening service and seeing the evening sun steal across her carpet and touch gently, the pictures on the wall.Gradually as she knelt there, calm and reassurance came back to her.She felt as though he, somewhere lost in the world, had heard her.She laid her cheek upon the quilt of the bed and, for the first time since Uncle Mathew's death, her thoughts worked in connected order, her courage returned to her, and she saw the room and the sun and the trees beyond the window as real objects, without the mist of terror and despair that had hitherto surrounded her.
She rose from her knees as though she were withdrawing from a horrible nightmare.She could remember nothing of the events of the last week save her talk with Paul that afternoon.She could recall nothing of the inquest, nor whether she had been to Church, nor any scene with Grace.
"So long as I'm alive and Martin's alive it's all right," she thought.She knew that he was alive.She would find him.She put away the things into the box again; she had not yet thought what she would do, but, in some way, she had received during those few minutes in her room a reassurance that she was not alone.
She went out into the spring dusk.She chose the road towards Barnham Wood because it was lonely there and the hedges were thin;you could feel the breath of the sea as it blew across the sparse fields.The hush of an English Sunday evening enfolded the road, the wood, the fields.The sun was very low and the saffron light penetrated the dark lines of the hedges and hung like a curtain of misty gold before the approaches to the wood.The red-brown fields rolled to the horizon and lay, like a carpet, at the foot of the town huddled against the pale sky.