A light was still shining in Eglington's study when the carriage drove
up. With a latch-key Hylda admitted herself and her maid.

The storm had broken, the flood had come. The storm was over, but the
flood swept far and wide.

CHAPTER XXXVII. THE FLYING SHUTTLE

Hour after hour of sleeplessness. The silver-tongued clock remorselessly
tinkled the quarters, and Hylda lay and waited for them with a hopeless
strained attention. In vain she tried devices to produce that monotony
of thought which sometimes brings sleep. Again and again, as she felt
that sleep was coming at last, the thought of the letter she had found
flashed through her mind with words of fire, and it seemed as if there
had been poured through every vein a subtle irritant. Just such a
surging, thrilling flood she had felt in the surgeon's chair when she
was a girl and an anesthetic had been given. But this wave of sensation
led to no oblivion, no last soothing intoxication. Its current beat
against her heart until she could have cried out from the mere physical
pain, the clamping grip of her trouble. She withered and grew cold under
the torture of it all--the ruthless spoliation of everything which made
life worth while or the past endurable.

About an hour after she had gone to bed she heard Eglington's step. It
paused at her door. She trembled with apprehension lest he should enter.
It was many a day since he had done so, but also she had not heard his
step pause at her door for many a day. She could not bear to face it all
now; she must have time to think, to plan her course--the last course
of all. For she knew that the next step must be the last step in her old
life, and towards a new life, whatever that might be. A great sigh of
relief broke from her as she heard his door open and shut, and silence
fell on everything, that palpable silence which seems to press upon the
night-watcher with merciless, smothering weight.

How terribly active her brain was! Pictures--it was all vivid pictures,
that awful visualisation of sorrow which, if it continues, breaks the
heart or wrests the mind from its sanity. If only she did not see! But
she did see Eglington and the Woman together, saw him look into her
eyes, take her hands, put his arm round her, draw her face to his!
Her heart seemed as if it must burst, her lips cried out. With a
great effort of the will she tried to hide from these agonies of the
imagination, and again she would approach those happ