e mocking flowers in the garden
would be all beaten to death before morning by the lash of wind and
rain.

Then she recovered her mental poise and put the hateful memories away
from her as she went steadily up the narrow stairs and along the hall
with its curious slant as the house had settled, to her own room under
the north-western eaves.

When she had put out her light and gone to bed she found that she
could not sleep. She pretended to believe that it was the noise of the
storm that kept her awake. Not even to herself would Emily confess
that she was waiting and listening nervously for John's return home.
That would have been to admit a weakness, and Emily Fair, like Amelia,
despised weakness.

Every few minutes a gust of wind smote the house, with a roar as of a
wild beast, and bombarded Emily's window with a volley of rattling
drops. In the silences that came between the gusts she heard the soft,
steady pouring of the rain on the garden paths below, mingled with a
faint murmur that came up from the creek beyond the barns where the
pine boughs were thrashing in the storm. Emily suddenly thought of a
weird story she had once read years before and long forgotten--a story
of a soul that went out in a night of storm and blackness and lost its
way between earth and heaven. She shuddered and drew the counterpane
over her face.

"Of all things I hate a fall storm most," she muttered. "It frightens
me."

Somewhat to her surprise--for even her thoughts were generally well
under the control of her unbending will--she could not help thinking
of Stephen--thinking of him not tenderly or remorsefully, but
impersonally, as of a man who counted for nothing in her life. It was
so strange to think of Stephen being ill. She had never known him to
have a day's sickness in his life before. She looked back over her
life much as if she were glancing with a chill interest at a series of
pictures which in no way concerned her. Scene after scene, face after
face, flashed out on the background of the darkness.

Emily's mother had died at her birth, but Amelia Phillips, twenty
years older than the baby sister, had filled the vacant place so well
and with such intuitive tenderness that Emily had never been conscious
of missing a mother. John Phillips, too, the grave, silent, elder
brother, loved and petted the child. Woodford people were fond of
saying that John and Amelia spoiled Emily shamefully.

Emily Phillips had never been like