Hating herself for having seen, she went to her room, and
lay on her bed with her hands pressed to her eyes. She was used to
loneliness--that necessary lot of natures such as hers; but the bitter
isolation of this hour was such as to drive even her lonely nature to
despair.
She rose at last, and repaired the ravages made in her face and dress,
lest anyone should see that she was suffering. Then, first making sure
that Hilary had left the garden, she stole out.
She wandered towards Hyde Park. It was Whitsuntide, a time of fear to
the cultivated Londoner. The town seemed all arid jollity and paper bags
whirled on a dusty wind. People swarmed everywhere in clothes which did
not suit them; desultory, dead-tired creatures who, in these few green
hours of leisure out of the sandy eternity of their toil, were not
suffered to rest, but were whipped on by starved instincts to hunt
pleasures which they longed for too dreadfully to overtake.
Bianca passed an old tramp asleep beneath a tree. His clothes had clung
to him so long and lovingly that they were falling off, but his face was
calm as though masked with the finest wax. Forgotten were his sores and
sorrows; he was in the blessed fields of sleep.
Bianca hastened away from the sight of such utter peace. She wandered
into a grove of trees which had almost eluded the notice of the crowd.
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