s and burning, aching head.
With the manifold distractions of errant blood which, leaving her heart
empty as a turned-down glass, drummed in her ears and throbbed behind her
eyeballs. These discomforts were severely real enough, in all conscience,
to excuse her for being self-occupied and a trifle selfish; to justify a
blank refusal to receive Theresa Bilson, or attempt to retail and discuss
the events of yesterday. All she craved was quiet, to be left alone, to
lie silent in the quiet light of the covered grey day.

In the earlier hours of it, silver rain showers travelled across the sea
to spend themselves, tearfully, against the panes of her bedroom
windows. But towards evening the cloud lifted, revealing a watery
sunset, spread in timid reds and yellows behind Stone Horse Head and the
curving coast-line beyond, away to Stourmouth and Barryport. The faint
tentative colours struck in long glinting shafts between the trunks and
branches of the stone pines and Scotch firs in the so-called
Wilderness--a strip of uncultivated land within the confines of the
grounds dividing the gardens from the open Warren to the West--and
gleamed in at the windows, faintly dyeing the dimity hangings and
embroidered linen counterpane of Damaris' bed.

Throughout the afternoon she had been less restless. So that Mary Fisher,
judging her to be fairly asleep, some five minutes earlier had folded her
needlework together, and, leaving the chair where she sat sewing, went
softly from the room.

But that brightening of sunset disturbed Damaris, bringing her slowly
awake. For a time she lay watching, though but half consciously the
tinted radiance as--the trees now stirred by a little wind drawing out of
the sunset--it shifted and flitted over the white surfaces. At first it
pleased her idle fancy. But presently distressed her, as too thin, too
chill, too restlessly unsubstantial, the veriest chippering ghost of
colour and of light. It affected her with a desolating sadness as of
failure; of great designs richly attempted but petering out into a
pitiful nothingness; of love which aped and mimicked, being drained of
all purpose and splendour of hot blood; of partings whose sorrow had lost
its savour, yet which masqueraded in showy crape for a heart-break long
grown stale and obsolete.

Her temperature rushed up; and she threw off the bedclothes, raising
herself on her elbow, while the shafts of thin brightness wavered
fitfully. Through them sh