It was four o'clock in the morning.

Mrs.Walter Majendie still lay on the extreme edge of the bed, with her face turned to the dim line of sea discernible through the open window of the hotel bedroom.
Since midnight, when she had gone to bed, she had lain in that uncomfortable position, motionless, irremediably awake.

Mrs.Walter Majendie was thinking.
At first the night had gone by her unperceived, black and timeless.

Now she could measure time by the dull progress of the dawn among the objects in the room.

A slow, unhappy thing, born between featureless grey cloud and sea, it had travelled from the window, shimmered in the watery square of the looking-glass, and was feeling for the chair where her husband had laid his clothes down last night.