Cuckoo leaned her arms across the table,
glanced at the tea things for two, and listened. A cab stopped presently.
She twisted in her chair to face the window. It had drawn up next door,
and she subsided again into her fever of attention. Jessie found a crumb
and swallowed it with as much action and large air of tasting it as if it
had been a city dinner. The hands of the clock drew to the hour named in
Cuckoo's note, touched it, passed it. A sickness of despair began to
creep upon her like a thousand little biting insects. She shuffled in her
seat, glanced this way and that, pressed her lips together, and, taking
her arms from the table, clasped her hands tightly in her lap. Then she
sat straight up and counted the tickings of the clock, the spots on the
tablecloth, the gold stars upon the wallpaper of the room. She counted
and counted until her head began to swim. And all the time she waited,
the lady of the feathers was learning wisdom. The lesson was harsh, as
the lessons of time usually are; the lesson was bitter as Marah waters.
And she thought the lesson was going to be a cross too heavy for her
narrow shoulders to bear when the iron gate of the garden sang its
invariable little note of protest on being opened.
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