The mere fact of being absolutely alone from midday to dark would have been for Gloria an experience at any time and in any environment. Of her friends in the city there were many who had never in a lifetime known what it was to spend half a dozen consecutive daytime, waking hours in perfect solitude, catching not so much as a fleeting glimpse of a servant, a policeman, a nurse, or a street-car conductor in the echoing street. Solitude rendered rippleless by an absence of any familiar sound; neither the whisk of a maid's broom, the clang of a telephone bell, the buzz of motors, or the slamming of doors.
At those intervals when King thought of her, it was to realize that she might quite naturally find discomfort in her bleak surroundings, being denied coal-grate and upholstered chair; it did not suggest itself to him that the chief discomfort would be a spirit-crushing, terrifying loneliness.
She told herself, when he had gone, that she was glad to be alone. Five minutes later she began to stir restlessly; another five minutes and already she was listening for his return. Never once during the day was there a sudden or unexpected sound, whether the snapping of a burning faggot or the scratching against the rock of a log rolling apart, or the flap of her canvas, that she did not look expectantly toward the rude door through which she thought to see him returning.
Once that her restlessness came upon her she could not remain quiet. She drew on her boots and walked up and down, casting fearsome glances toward the darkest portion of the cavern, shunning it, keeping the fire between it and herself. When she peered out across the desolate world she drew back from its bleak menace, shuddering, returning to crouch miserably by her fire, shut in between two frightful things, the black unknown of the bowels of the cave, the white horror of the brutal, insensate wilderness. And, in her almost hysterical emotional frenzy she saw back of each of them the man, Mark King, as though they were but the expressions of his own brutality.
After an hour she felt that she would go mad unless she found something to hold her mind back from those hideous channels into which it slipped so readily. She snatched up the book which King had left with her, and forced herself to read. Pages eluded her, but here and there single lines or words caught her attention as a thorny copse catches and plucks the garments of one going blindly through it.
So she was arrested by the line: "In simpleness and gentleness and honour and clean mirth." And this was one of the times when she threw the book down and got up and walked back and forth impatiently. It was almost as though King had left the wretched volume behind to be his spokesman in his absence; she told herself angrily that he was not like that, had never been like that. He was a mere brute of a man, not "such as fought and sailed and ruled and loved and made our world." He was, rather, unthinkably crude and boorish and detestable.