ver sleep
itself! She had been dragged reluctantly from a dreamless Nirvana into
the presence of a waking nightmare--two great beautiful eyes that looked
at her and saw nothing; and this coercion, she somehow felt, was really
due to an unaccountable absence of mind on her part. Surely she could
have kept asleep with a little more common sense. She would go back from
that excursion reinforced, and bid defiance to that nightmare. Sleep
would come to her, she knew, if she could find a _modus vivendi_ with a
loose flood of golden hair, and could just get hold of a feather-quill
that was impatient of imprisonment and wanted to see the world. She
searched for it with the tenderest of finger-tips because she knew--as
all the feather-bed world knows--that if one is too rough with it, it
goes in, and comes out again just when one is dropping off....

There!--it was caught and pulled out. She would not burn it. It would
smell horribly and make her think of Lutwyche's remedy for fainting
fits, burned feathers held to the nostrils. No!--she would put it
through the casement into the night-air, and it would float away and
think of its days on the breast of an Imbergoose, and believe them back
again. Oh, the difference between the great seas and winds, and the
inside of that stuffy ticking! Poor little breast-feather of a foolish
bird! Yes--now she could go to sleep! She knew it quite well--she had
only to contrive a particular attitude.... There, that was right! Now
she had only to put worrying thoughts out of her head and count a
thousand ... and then--oblivion!

Alas, no such thing! In five minutes the particular attitude was a thing
of the past, and the worrying thoughts were back upon her with a
vengeance. Or, rather, the worrying thought; for her plural number was
hypocrisy. She was in for a deadly wakeful night, a night of growing
fever, with those sightless eyes expelling every other image from her
brain. She was left alone with the darkness and a question she dared not
try to answer. Suppose that when those eyes looked upon her that
evening at Arthur's Bridge for the first time--suppose it was also the
last? What then? How could she know it, and know how the thing came
about, and whom she held answerable for it, and go on living?...

No--her life would end with that. Nothing would again be as it had been
for her. Her childhood had ended when she first saw Death; when her
brother's corpse was carried home dripping from with