But now she was hardly conscious of pain--only of a
stupefied sense of loss. She felt as if her life were finished, as though
all the days and years that lay ahead of her were entirely empty and
purposeless. Sometime or other, she supposed, she would come alive again,
be able to feel and realise things once more. But she dreaded the coming of
that time. Better this apathy, like the stupor of one drugged, than a
repetition of the anguish she had already suffered.
It seemed as if she were endowed with a species of double consciousness--an
outward, everyday self which laughed and talked quite readily with the
people she knew, walked and rode, read and wrote letters just like any
one else, and a strange inner self which led a dumb, dreaming existence,
drearily remote from everything that made life keen and sentient.
Suddenly a tremor of wind ran between the great boulders of the cove,
whining eerily. It savoured of coming autumn, and Ann watched the quiet sea
bunch itself up into small, angry tufts of foam as the breeze which seemed
to have sprung up from nowhere fled across it. Then, feeling suddenly
chilled, she rose from where she was sitting and turned rather wearily
homeward.
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