before,
although it would have been hard to say in what the difference
consisted. Perhaps it was that they seemed to be waiting for something.
There were certainly fewer things to be done than usual. People drifted
through the drawing-room--Mr. Flushing, Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury. They
spoke very apologetically in low tones, refusing to sit down, but
remaining for a considerable time standing up, although the only thing
they had to say was, "Is there anything we can do?" and there was
nothing they could do.

Feeling oddly detached from it all, Terence remembered how Helen had
said that whenever anything happened to you this was how people behaved.
Was she right, or was she wrong? He was too little interested to frame
an opinion of his own. He put things away in his mind, as if one of
these days he would think about them, but not now. The mist of unreality
had deepened and deepened until it had produced a feeling of numbness
all over his body. Was it his body? Were those really his own hands?

This morning also for the first time Ridley found it impossible to sit
alone in his room. He was very uncomfortable downstairs, and, as he
did not know what was going on, constantly in the way; but he would not
leave the drawing-room. Too restless to read, and having nothing to do,
he began to pace up and down reciting poetry in an undertone. Occupied
in various ways--now in undoing parcels, now in uncorking bottles, now
in writing directions, the sound of Ridley's song and the beat of his
pacing worked into the minds of Terence and St. John all the morning as
a half comprehended refrain.

They wrestled up, they wrestled down,
They wrestled sore and still:
The fiend who blinds the eyes of men,
That night he had his will.

Like stags full spent, among the bent
They dropped awhile to rest--

"Oh, it's intolerable!" Hirst exclaimed, and then checked himself, as if
it were a breach of their agreement. Again and again Terence would creep
half-way up the stairs in case he might be able to glean news of Rachel.
But the only news now was of a very fragmentary kind; she had drunk
something; she had slept a little; she seemed quieter. In the same way,
Dr. Lesage confined himself to talking about details, save once when
he volunteered the information that he had just been called in to
ascertain, by severing a vein in the wrist, that an old lady of
eighty-five was really dead. She had a horror of being