Читать книгу Wintersmoon онлайн

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And she was not afraid.

That was the astonishing thing. Rosalind declared that were it she, she would be terrified. Going as nobody at all—simply as the sister—of course she did not mind.

But Janet was surprised at her own absence of fear. She had been anticipating this event for many days; she saw in Wildherne's allusions to it that he was himself nervous. She had expected to be afraid and, with joy she knew it, she was not.

She was not afraid, because other things of a more serious nature were occupying her mind, and the most serious of them was Rosalind. She knew as she stood at the window of their little room and looked down at the pattern of lights threading the dusk below her that she was in one of those moods described by Rosalind as "melodramatic," those moods that Rosalind so deeply detested. She only knew these moods in relation to her sister, and they came always when she doubted Rosalind's love for her. There were times—and of late they had been frequent—when she seemed to lose touch with Rosalind altogether, when there was nothing to feed the hunger of her love. Calm, sensible, controlled as she could be with everyone else, with Rosalind she was sometimes like a desperate lover. She knew well when these moods were upon her and she hated them, but hate them as she might they gripped her with a dreadful and torturing pain as though the fingers of some animal were laid upon her heart.