As I crept to the wall, and raised myself against it, I looked back, and saw the window of the Count’s dressing-room gleam into light. My sinking courage flickered up in me again, and kept my eyes fixed on his window, as I stole my way back, step by step, past the wall of the house. The clock struck the quarter after one, when I laid my hands on the windowsill of my own room. I had seen nothing and heard nothing which could lead me to suppose that my retreat had been discovered.
X
June 20th.—Eight o’clock. The sun is shining in a clear sky. I have not been near my bed—I have not once closed my weary wakeful eyes. From the same window at which I looked out into the darkness of last night, I look out now at the bright stillness of the morning. I count the hours that have passed since I escaped to the shelter of this room by my own sensations—and those hours seem like weeks. How short a time, and yet how long to me —since I sank down in the darkness, here, on the floor—drenched to the skin, cramped in every limb, cold to the bones, a useless, helpless, panic-stricken creature. I hardly know when I roused myself. I hardly know when I groped my way back to the bedroom, and lighted the candle, and searched (with a strange ignorance, at first, of where to look for them) for dry clothes to warm me. The doing of these things is in my mind, but not the time when they were done.