"If our Rita were to die before long . . ."
She didn't get any further because I had jumped up and frightened
her by shouting: "Is she ill? What has happened? Have you had a
letter?"
She had had a letter. I didn't ask her to show it to me, though I
daresay she would have done so. I had an idea that there was no
meaning in anything, at least no meaning that mattered. But the
interruption had made Therese apparently forget her sinister
conundrum. She observed me with her shrewd, unintelligent eyes for
a bit, and then with the fatuous remark about the Law being just
she left me to the horrors of the studio. I believe I went to
sleep there from sheer exhaustion. Some time during the night I
woke up chilled to the bone and in the dark. These were horrors
and no mistake. I dragged myself upstairs to bed past the
indefatigable statuette holding up the ever-miserable light. The
black-and-white hall was like an ice-house.
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