My head still echoed the rhythmic jogging of the train, for I am one of those unfortunates who, if they travel five hundred miles in actuality, travel at least another thousand during sleep. The bed was cosy enough to make the prospect of leaving it seem unattractive and I lay sleepily surveying my room and listening with drowsy intentness to the sounds of the morning. There was a clanking of cans, which I assumed to be milk-pails; the impatient clucking and questioning of hens, interspersed with loud flutterings of wings; a strange intermittent wailing noise which I was quite unable to identify; doors opening and closing and dishes clattering: sounds which seemed to indicate that the Lord had seen fit to spare my landlady for another day’s work, and also that the poultry still awaited their morning feed. The hands of my watch were pointing to half past eight when there were footsteps on the stairs followed by a knock at my bedroom door.
