and became entangled in them; now he would cast them from
him and trample them under his feet; and now they would be flapping
about his head; he would be covered and utterly concealed in newspaper.

It was a perpetual wind of newspaper, now high, now low; small, creeping
sounds that rose to a crescendo; rushing, ripping, shrieking sounds of
agitated newspaper, lacerating Laura's nerves, and murderous to the
rhythm of her prose.

Tears fell from Laura's eyes as she wrote; they dropped, disfiguring her
letter. Her head ached. It was always aching now. And when she tried to
write she felt as if she were weaving string out of the grey matter of
her brain, with the thread breaking all the time.

At four o'clock she rose wearily and began to get tea ready. Nina was
coming to tea that afternoon. It was something to look forward to,
something that would stave off the pressure and the pain.

Her tether had stretched; it had given her inches; but this was the end
of it. She did not see, herself, now, any more than Nina or Jane or
Tanqueray saw, how she was to go on. She did not know how, for
instance, she was to face the terrible question of finance. For the last
six months she had not written any paragraphs. Even if Papa had not made
it impossible for her to write them, her head and all the ideas in it
were giving out. She had lost her job. She was living precariously on
translation, which could be done, she maintained, when you hadn't any
head at all. She would get twenty pounds for it, and there would be
forty, perhaps, for the book which she had been sitting up to write. She
did not know where the money for next year was coming from; and there
were the doctor and the chemist now to pay for poor Papa.

The doctor and the chemist had not cured him of his dreams. The dreams
were incessant, and they were more horrid than they had ever been. She
hadn't slept for fear of the opening of the door, and the sound of the
slow feet shuffling to her bedside, and the face that took on more and
more the likeness of the horrors that he dreamed.

The dreams, she had gathered, were a very bad sign. She had been told
that she must be on the look-out; she must not leave him. She knew what
that meant. Her fear might take shape any day or any night.

Last night she had moved her bed into his room.

The doctor had looked grave when she told him what she had done. There
should be, he said, an attendant for the night. To be on the look-out
n