e?"

At that moment there was a feeble scratching on the door. Paul,
evidently glad of anything that would relieve the situation, opened the
door.

"Why, it's Mitch!" cried Grace, forgetting for the moment her mother.
"Fancy! It's Mitch! Mitch, dear! Was she glad to see her old friend
back again? Was she? Darling! Fancy seeing her old friend again? Was
she wanting her back?"

Mitch stood shivering in the doorway, then, with her halting step, the
skin of her back wrinkled with anxiety, she crossed the room. For a
moment she hesitated, then with shamefaced terror, slunk to Maggie,
pressed up against her, and sat there huddled, staring at Grace with
yellow unfriendly eyes.

CHAPTER IV

GRACE

Not in a day and not in a night did Maggie find a key to that strange
confusion of fears, superstitions, and self-satisfactions that was
known to the world as Grace Trenchard. Perhaps she never found it, and
through all the struggle and conflict in which she was now to be
involved she was fighting, desperately, in the dark. Fight she did, and
it was this same conflict, bitter and tragic enough at the time, that
transformed her into the woman that she became ... and through all that
conflict it may be truly said of her that she never knew a moment's
bitterness--anger, dismay, loneliness, even despair-bitterness never.

It was not strange that Maggie did not understand Grace; Grace never
understood herself nor did she make the slightest attempt to do so. It
would be easy enough to cover the ground at once by saying that she had
no imagination, that she never went behind the thing that she saw, and
that she found the grasping of external things quite as much as she
could manage. But that is not enough. Very early indeed, when she had
been a stolid-faced little girl with a hot desire for the doll
possessed by her neighbour, she had had for nurse a woman who rejoiced
in supernatural events. With ghost stories of the most terrifying kind
she besieged Grace's young heart and mind. The child had never
imagination enough to visualise these stories in the true essence, but
she seized upon external detail-the blue lights, the white shimmering
garments, the moon and the church clock, the clanking chain and the
stain of blood upon the board.

These things were not for her, and indeed did she allow her fancy to
dwell, for a moment, upon them she was besieged at once by so horrid a
panic that she lost all control and self-possessi