'Well, they always have the extremes up there, don't they?
We get the first of the bad weather down here.
It will blow hard on the coast before morning.'
His wife brought us the tea.
It tasted of bitter wood, but it was hot.
I drank it greedily, thankfully.
Already Maxim was glancing at his watch.
'We ought to be going,' he said.
'It's ten minutes to twelve.'
I left the shelter of the garage reluctantly.
The cold wind blew in my face.
The stars raced across the sky.
There were threads of cloud too.
'Yes,' said the garage man, 'summer's over for this year.'
We climbed back into the car.
I settled myself once more under the rug.
The car went on.
I shut my eyes.
There was the man with the wooden leg winding his barrel-organ, and the tune of
'Roses in Picardy' hummed in my head against the jolting of the car.
Frith and Robert carried the tea into the library.
The woman at the lodge nodded to me abruptly, and called her child into the house.
I saw the model boats in the cottage in the cove. and the feathery dust.
I saw the cobwebs stretching from the little masts.
I heard the rain upon the roof and the sound of the sea.
I wanted to get to the Happy Valley and it was not there.
There were woods about me, there was no Happy Valley.
Only the dark trees and the young bracken.
The owls hooted.
The Moon was shining in the windows of Manderley.
There were nettles in the garden, ten foot, twenty foot high.
'Maxim!'
I cried.
'Maxim!'
'Yes,' he said.
'It's all right, I'm here.'
'I had a dream,' I said.
'A dream.'
'What was it?' he said.
'I don't know.
I don't know.'
Back again into the moving unquiet depths.
I was writing letters in the morning-room.
I was sending out invitations.
I wrote them all myself with a thick black pen.
But when I looked down to see what I had written it was not my small square handwriting at all, it was long, and slanting, with curious pointed strokes.
I pushed the cards away from the blotter and hid them.
I got up and went to the looking-glass.
A face stared back at me that was not my own.
It was very pale, very lovely, framed in a cloud of dark hair.