It was in one sense a relief that
Lady Bassett, being caught in the full swing of the Simla season, was
unable to spare much of her society for the suddenly bereaved girl who
had been thrust upon her. But there were times during that period of
dragging convalescence when any presence would have been welcome.
She was no longer acutely ill, but a low fever hung about her, a
species of physical inertia against which she had no strength to
struggle. And often she wondered to herself with a dreary amazement,
why she still lived, why she had survived the horrors of that flight
through the mountains, why she had been thus, as it were, cast up upon
a desert rock when all that had made life good in her eyes had been
ruthlessly swept away. At such times there would come upon her a
loneliness almost unthinkable, a shrinking more terrible than the fear
of death, and the future would loom before her black as night, a blank
and awful desert which she felt she could never dare to travel.
Sometimes in her dreams there would come to her other visions--visions
of the gay world that throbbed so close to her, the world she had
entered with her father so short a time before. She would hear again
the hubbub of laughing voices, the music, the tramp of dancing feet.
And she would start from her sleep to find only a great emptiness, a
listening silence, an unspeakable desolation.
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