A mere “Good-night!” ends their conversation at length, and the girl did not re-enter the drawing-room, but passed straight up the stairs to her own room.

“Does he care?  Does he care or not?” she asked herself, walking ceaselessly backwards and forwards.  “If I only knew that he did!  This is killing me; and suppose, after all, he does not care!”

She almost reels in her walk, and then stretches her arms out on her mantelpiece, and leans her head heavily upon them.

“So this is being in love!” she thinks, with a faint satirical smile.  “All this anxiety and pain and feeling of illness!  Why, it is as if poison had been poured through me.”

Through the next day May lay pallid and silent on the couch, without pretence of occupation, feeling too exhausted even to respond to her sister’s chaff and raillery.

It was only at dinner, when her brother-in-law informed his wife he was sick of the place, and that nothing would induce him to stay more than another week, that a stain of scarlet colour appeared in May’s cheeks and a terrified dilation in her eyes.

Her lids were lowered directly, and the blood receded again.  She made no remark, but at the close of dinner she excused herself, and went upstairs alone.

Once in her room, she stripped off her dinner-dress and shoes, and re-dressed in morning things.  Her hands trembled so violently that she could hardly fasten her bodice over the wildly-expanding bosom.

But her resolve was fixed.  They were going in a week.  To-morrow, she knew, Stephen was leaving the place for a fortnight.  She must see him to-night.

When she is completely dressed, she pauses for a moment to choke down the terrible physical excitement that seems to rob her of breath and muscular power.

Then she passes downstairs quietly and goes out.

The night is still, cold, and dark.

May walks rapidly through the few streets that divide his house and hers.

The few men she meets turn involuntarily to glance after the splendid form that goes by them, and in her decisive walk, in the eyes blind to them, they feel instinctively she is already owned, mentally or actually, by some one other.

When she reaches Stephen’s house, she learns he is in, and with a great fear of him suddenly rushing over her, she sends word up to him by the servant:  Will he see her?

While she waits in the hall, her message is taken upstairs.  May leans against the wall, a terrible sick faintness, born of excitement and hysteria, coming suddenly upon her.

There is a hall-chair, but her eyes are too darkened to see it; she simply clings to the handle of the door, and lets her head sink against the side of the passage.

Brookes is upstairs with his brother and two friends; they have been playing cards, but a game is just over, and the men have got up to stretch themselves.