nourishment there was to be found in the cupboards
where they stored the food for their breakfasts. On the side of her
bed she sometimes sat, biting a dry piece of bread--anything that
she could find--in that unconscious instinct with which the body
prompts the mind for its own preservation. But these meals--if such
they can be called--she took at no stated times. Crusts of bread lay
about on the table, showing how indiscriminately of order she had
fed herself. For two hours together, she would sit in awful silence,
with eyes strained staringly before her. Of tears, there were none.
Sometimes a sob broke through her lips when a sound downstairs
reminded her of him; but no tears accompanied it. It was more like
the complaining cry of some animal in its sleep.

For the first two nights she just flung herself on her bed when the
darkness came. She did not undress. The nights were warm then, or
cold might have driven her between the clothes. But, on the third
evening, she disrobed. This was habit reasserting itself. She did
it unconsciously, only remembering as she crept, shuddering, between
the sheets, that for the two previous nights she had not gone to bed
at all.

The toppling fall of reason would soon have ended it; that merciful
potion of magic which can bring a torturing misery in the guise of
a quaint conceit to a mind made simple as a little child's. Another
day or so, and the frightened agony that glittered in her
eyes--fusing slowly towards the last great conflagration--would
have burnt up in the sudden panic-flare as the reason guttered out,
then smouldered down into that pitiable lightless flickering where
all glimmer of intelligence is dead.

Inevitably this must have followed, had not Janet visited her late
in the evening of the fourth day. Two days before, she had written
saying that she would come if Traill were not likely to be there.

Her note finished abruptly, characteristic of all her letters.

"If I don't hear from you to the contrary," it concluded, "I shall
arrive."

She heard nothing to the contrary. The letter had lain, since its
arrival, in the box downstairs. Sally had not moved out of her room.
The possibility of a letter from Traill might have drawn her forth;
but she knew that such a possibility did not exist. The woman who
attended to their rooms she had sent away.

"I shall be able to look after these two rooms myself," she had
thought vaguely. Then she had locked herself into her