an adequate cause for it,
no foreseeing the moment of its end. One endured it like a prolonged
bad dream, wherein the magnified affections shake one in one's
helplessness at their will. At such times all that had ever been pain,
disappointment, defeat, however long recovered from, came again to
perfect life in memory, while all that had been happy, diminished to
insignificant proportions, retreated out of sight. "Why do I feel like
this?" Celia could still ask herself by daylight, and repeat,
"Everything is all right." But in the night time the power of the
thing was complete.

She had at last, after some three days of such nerve-sickness, taken
something to assist sleep. But the small hours found her, in spite of
all, awake and staring into the dark, with her troubled mind harping
upon the same chords. She sat up in bed, old sorrows bleeding
afresh with the new; she took her confused head between her hands,
and was voicing the unreconcilement of millions before her and to
follow: "Why is everything I love made into an instrument to punish
me? What have I done? Why all this senseless pain and calamity to
me? Why to me one after the other two losses such as, coming singly
in a life, would be enough to darken the sun? Are you, stupid
blind Fate, weaving a pattern in which the same design must repeat
itself? For is it justice that twice I should have the thing my heart
had grown around taken from me, and not in the terrible legitimate
way of death, but just placed out of reach and sight, while I
torture myself with wondering what may be happening to make the
beloved suffer?... Oh, Larry, why ... why this dismay inseparable from
the thought of you?" The torture of the visions of Larry which,
spite of her shuddering repudiation, would obtrude themselves, was
such now that even in her morbid mood she recognized something
disproportionate in it, and had clear-sightedness to attribute it to
a reaction from the narcotic. She tried to get herself more
normally awake. She strained her eyes to see the figures upon her
watch, and a sort of patience fell upon her, ascertaining that in
an hour or so it would begin to be day, by the light of which the
worst never appears quite so unendurable. She felt cold now, and
drawing up her quilt went through the forlorn mockery of composing
herself to sleep.

Perhaps for a moment without knowing it she dozed, for when the
barking of Beech, who slept in the laundry, roused her with a start,