ch, was left, bewildered, at a loss, as though she were
suddenly in the service of some stranger.

She had known that nothing more terrible could happen to her mistress
than this--When she heard it she said to herself, "This will kill
her--bound to--" She had known too that her mistress would not flinch,
outwardly, and that to the ordinary observer there would be no sign, but
the thing for which she had not been prepared was this silence, a
silence so profound and yet so eloquent that one could obtain from it no
clue, could discern no visible wound, but daily, almost hourly, as she
sat there, change was at work ... she was dying before their eyes--

What Dorchester did not know was that the Duchess had been aware, for a
long time, that this was to occur, if not exactly this, why, then,
something like it.

All through that autumn she had sat there waiting--the War, the
rebellion of her children--it only needed that disaster should overtake
Roddy and the circle was complete.

She did not doubt that it was because he had married Rachel that this
had happened to him, and she might have prevented his marriage to Rachel
had she wished.

The girl had now for her sitting there in her room the fatal
inevitability of some hostile spirit. She saw all her past years as a
duel with this girl, the one soul in rebellion against hers. Rachel
had taken everything from her; she had first stirred Adela and John
into rebellion, she had encouraged Francis Breton, she had destroyed
Roddy ... she rose, before the old woman's eyes, black, titanic,
sweeping, with great dark wings, across the horizon.

The Duchess did not in so many words state that Rachel had flung her
husband from his horse and then watched whilst his body was dragged
along the stones, but, in some way, the girl had plotted it.

The old woman had indeed during these last months suffered from visions.
There were days when her brain was as clear as it had ever been and on
these days she thought more of Roddy than of Rachel, ached to be with
him, longed to comfort him and make life bearable for him, cursed
whatever fate it was that had ordained that upon him of all people such
a burden should have fallen. Then there were other days when the old
china dragons seemed more real than Dorchester, when shapes and sizes
altered in an instant, when the cushion at her feet was swollen like a
mountain, when she seemed floating through space, looking down upon
houses, cities, mounta