They looked as though they would never open, never be thrown wide.
It was by the large window in the centre that I had stood five minutes before.
How high it seemed above my head, how lofty and remote.
The stones were hard and solid under my feet.
I looked down at my feet and then up again to the shuttered window, and as I did so I became aware suddenly that my head was swimming and I felt hot.
A little trickle of perspiration ran down the back of my neck.
Black dots jumped about in the air in front of me.
I went into the hall again and sat down on a chair.
My hands were quite wet.
I sat very still, holding my knees.
'Frith,' I called,
'Frith, are you in the dining-room?'
'Yes, Madam?' He came out at once, and crossed the hall towards me.
'Don't think me very odd, Frith, but I rather think I'd like a small glass of brandy.'
'Certainly, Madam.'
I went on holding my knees and sitting very still.
He came back with a liqueur glass on a silver salver.
'Do you feel a trifle unwell, Madam?' said Frith.
'Would you like me to call Clarice?'
'No, I'll be all right, Frith,' I said.
'I felt a bit hot, that's all.'
'It's a very warm morning, Madam.
Very warm indeed.
Oppressive, one might almost say.'
'Yes, Frith. Very oppressive.'
I drank the brandy and put the glass back on the silver salver.
'Perhaps the sound of those rockets alarmed you,' said Frith; 'they went off so very sudden.'
'Yes, they did,' I said.
'And what with the hot morning and standing about all last night, you are not perhaps feeling quite like yourself, Madam,' said Frith.
'No, perhaps not,' I said.
'Will you lie down for half an hour?
It's quite cool in the library.'
'No.
No, I think I'll go out in a moment or two.
Don't bother, Frith.' 'No.
Very good, Madam.'
He went away and left me alone in the hall.
It was quiet sitting there, quiet and cool.
All trace of the party had been cleared away.
It might never have happened.
The hall was as it had always been, grey and silent and austere, with the portraits and the weapons on the wall.
I could scarcely believe that last night I had stood there in my blue dress at the bottom of the stairs, shaking hands with five hundred people.
I could not believe that there had been music-stands in the minstrels' gallery, and a band playing there, a man with a fiddle, a man with a drum. I got up and went out on to the terrace again.
The fog was rising, lifting to the tops of the trees.
I could see the woods at the end of the lawns.
Above my head a pale sun tried to penetrate the heavy sky.
It was hotter than ever.
Oppressive, as Frith had said.
A bee hummed by me in search of scent, bumbling, noisy, and then creeping inside a flower was suddenly silent.
On the grass banks above the lawns the gardener started his mowing machine.