She took a certain hygienic pride in the extent to which she always opened her bedroom windows even when, as at present, the night was bitterly cold.

In the morning she ran, huddling on her dressing-gown, into a heated bathroom, and when she emerged from this, the maid had always lighted her fire, and laid her breakfast-tray close to the blaze.

To-night, when she went to open her window, she noticed that the houses opposite had lost courage and showed only cracks.

She stood a second looking up at the stars, twinkling with tiny blue rays through the clear air.

By turning her head to the west she could look down on the park, with its surface of bare, blurred tree-branches pierced by rows of lights.