w flame her touch inspired flickered a red reflection on the face
of the cabinet--the cabinet with the secret drawer that had "inspired
Edgar with mysterious tales."

Jane went to it, and patted it, and stroked it, and coaxed it to tell
her its secret. But it would not.

"If it would only inspire _me_," she said, "if I could only get an idea
for the story, I could do it now--this minute. Lots of people work best
at night. My brain's really quite clear again now, or else I shouldn't
be able to remember all these silly little things. No, no," she cried to
a memory of a young man kissing a glove, a little creeping memory that
came to sting. She trampled on it.

Next day Jane walked four miles to see a doctor and get a sleeping
draught.

"You see," she explained very earnestly, "I have some work to finish,
and if I don't sleep I can't. And I must do it. I can't tell you how
important it is."

The doctor gave her something in a bottle when he had asked a few
questions, and she went back to the cottage to go on bearing what was
left of the interminable, intolerable day.

That was the day when she set out the fair white writing paper, and the
rosy blotting-paper, and the black ink and the black fountain pen, and
sat and looked at them for hours and hours. She prayed for help--but no
help came.

"I'm probably praying to the wrong people," she said, when through the
dusk the square of paper showed vague as a tombstone in twilit
grass--"the wrong people--No, there are no tombstones in the sea--the
wrong people. If St Anthony helps you to find things, and the other
saints help you to be good, perhaps the dead people who used to write
themselves are the ones to help one to write!"

Jane is ashamed to be quite sure that she remembers praying to Dante and
Shakespeare, and at last to Christina Rossetti, because she was a woman
and loved her brothers.

But no help came. The old woman fussed in and out with wood for the
fire--candles--food. Very kindly, it appears, but Jane wished she
wouldn't. Jane thinks she must have eaten some of the food, or the old
woman would not have left her as she did.

Jane took the draught, and went to bed.

* * * * *

When Mrs Beale came into the sitting-room next morning, a neat pile of
manuscript lay on the table, and when she took a cup of tea to Jane's
bedside, Jane was sleeping so placidly that the old woman had not the
heart to disturb her, and set the te