Then there were no more cigarettes and he had, quite petulantly,
complained of the trouble of going down into the room for a new tin. She
had gone cheerfully, as she would have fetched things for her father.
She did not realize that, by waiting on his whims, she was lowering
herself in his esteem. He had taken the cigarettes without a word of
thanks. It was only when she lay awake for hours afterwards, with a
vague discomfort that was certainly not physical, that she remembered
and was amazed that he could have remembered cigarettes just then. It
did not square at all with her Lover dream. And the Southern Cross as
she lay with unblinking eyes staring into the great, still dome above
her, was disappointing. She had heard so much about it; she had thought
it would be a group of flaming suns in the night sky. And its separate
pointers were not even so big and bright as Venus. She felt, somehow,
that she had been cheated a little; and immediately told herself that it
was not so really--either she had expected too much, or else she was not
clever enough to see what was really there all the time.
She did not go to sleep all the night. It was at four o'clock that she
crept quietly from underneath the blankets and sat on the coping,
perilously near the edge of the outer wall, with the dawn wind from the
sea blowing deliciously cold through her thin nightgown.
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