oney!"

II

"Nay," said Mrs. Maldon to Thomas Batchgrew, "I'm not going to die
just yet."

Her voice was cheerful, even a little brisk, and she spoke with a
benign smile in the tranquil accents of absolute conviction. But she
did not move her head; she waited to look at Thomas Batchgrew until
he came within her field of vision at the foot of the bed. This
quiescence had a disconcerting effect, contradicting her voice.

She was lying on her back, in the posture customary to her, the arms
being stretched down by the sides under the bed-quilt. Her features
were drawn slightly askew; the skin was shiny; the eyes stared as
though Mrs. Maldon had been a hysterical subject. It was evident that
she had passed through a tremendous physical crisis. Nevertheless,
Rachel was still astounded at the change for the better in her,
wrought by sleep and the force of her obstinate vitality.

The contrast between the scene which Thomas Batchgrew now saw and
the scene which had met Rachel in the night was so violent as to seem
nearly incredible. Not a sign of the catastrophe remained, except in
Mrs. Maldon's face, and in some invalid gear on the dressing-table,
for Rachel had gradually got the room into order. She had even closed
and locked the wardrobe.

On answering Mrs. Maldon's summons in the night, Rachel had found the
central door of the wardrobe swinging and the sacred big drawer at the
bottom of that division only half shut, and Mrs. Maldon in a peignoir
lying near it on the floor, making queer inhuman noises, not moans,
but a kind of anxious, inarticulate entreaty, and shaking her head
constantly to the left--never to the right. Mrs. Maldon had recognized
Rachel, and had seemed to implore with agonized intensity her
powerful assistance in some nameless and hopeless tragic dilemma. The
sight--especially of the destruction of the old woman's dignity--was
dreadful to such an extent that Rachel did not realize its effect on
herself until several hours afterwards. At the moment she called on
the immense reserves of her self-confidence to meet the situation--and
she met it, assisting her pride with the curious pretence,
characteristic of the Five Towns race, that the emergency was
insufficient to alarm in the slightest degree a person of sagacity and
sang-froid.

She had restored Mrs. Maldon to her bed and to some of her dignity.
But the horrid symptoms were not thereby abated. The inhuman
noises and the distressing, incomp