nderneath the blankets and sat on the coping,
perilously near the edge of the outer wall, with the dawn wind from the
sea blowing deliciously cold through her thin nightgown. Daybreak came
like the rolling up of a blind; thoughts and memories chased each other
in her mind. She looked across at Louis, fast asleep. Her impulse told
her to waken and ask him to kiss her good morning. And then she stopped
dead. Her feet were carrying her, very uncomfortably, over the rusted
corrugated iron of the roof towards him. Her brain signalled to them to
stop, and they would not! She felt herself being carried by them quite
against her will, and in another moment she knew that her lips would be
on his eyes, kissing him to waken him. And at that moment her foot
caught on a nail that the weathering of the iron had exposed. She gave a
little, repressed cry of pain and saw her foot bleeding.

She sat down exactly where she was; her foot went on bleeding, but she
did not notice it. The slight pain had done its work in jerking her to
an awareness of her body.

"Oh, my goodness," she said out aloud, "I'm caught! I'm chained! Louis
was right when he said I didn't understand about these hungers. Oh, my
goodness, it's like Louis's feet take him to a whisky bottle. My feet
were simply coolly walking me off to waken him up."

She sat motionless, scarcely breathing. Her heart began to thump
unpleasantly and she felt a flush tingling down to her feet and to the
tips of her fingers.

"If I hadn't torn my foot then I'd have given way to that blaze--and
each time you give way to a thing it chains you a bit more! I'd never
have had a chance to sit cool and think it out, because I'd have
forgotten, before I knew where I was, that it needed thinking out at
all. I'd have wakened him by now."

This jerked her, wakened her, widened her. Swiftly she was able to see
that Louis, on his whisky chase, de Quincy on his opium chase, King
David, Solomon, Nelson, Byron and Kraill on their woman chase were not
perhaps so fortunate as to get a nail jabbed in their feet, pulling them
up sharp and giving them time to think.

"There I've been blaming them a bit--pitying them a lot! Heavens, I was
_superior_!" she said.

The sun came up out of the sea and looked at her.

"Because I didn't know," she told it. "I was superior! Because I'd never
felt the pull of a chain."

She thought the sun took on a horribly knowing, superior expression.

Another rather shakin