* * * * *

Those eight days, required by law, had passed very peacefully.  She had taken with her enough money to enter one of the private homes furnished with sufficient comfort to save from distractions those who had been accustomed to gentle living:  the nurses had been pleasant and sympathetic; she had nothing to complain of.

She had suffered, of course, to some degree from reactions.  The second night after her arrival had been terrible, when, as she lay in bed in the hot darkness, her whole sentient life had protested and struggled against the fate her will ordained.  It had demanded the familiar things—­the promise of food and breath and human intercourse; it had writhed in horror against the blind dark towards which it moved so inevitably; and, in the agony had been pacified only by the half-hinted promise of some deeper voice suggesting that death was not the end.  With morning light sanity had come back; the will had reassumed the mastery, and, with it, had withdrawn explicitly the implied hope of continued existence.  She had suffered again for an hour or two from a more concrete fear; the memory came back to her of those shocking revelations that ten years ago had convulsed England and brought about the establishment of these Homes under Government supervision—­those evidences that for years in the great vivisection laboratories human subjects had been practised upon—­persons who with the same intentions as herself had cut themselves off from the world in private euthanasia-houses, to whom had been supplied a gas that suspended instead of destroying animation....  But this, too, had passed with the return of light.  Such things were impossible now under the new system—­at least, in England.  She had refrained from making an end upon the Continent for this very reason.  There, where sentiment was weaker, and logic more imperious, materialism was more consistent.  Since men were but animals—­the conclusion was inevitable.

There had been but one physical drawback, the intolerable heat of the days and nights.  It seemed, scientists said, that an entirely unexpected heat-wave had been generated; there were a dozen theories, most of which were mutually exclusive one of another.  It was humiliating, she thought, that men who professed to have taken the earth under their charge should be so completely baffled.  The conditions of the weather had of course been accompanied by disasters; there had been earthquakes of astonishing violence, a ripple had wrecked not less than twenty-five towns in America; an island or two had disappeared, and that bewildering Vesuvius seemed to be working up for a denouement.  But no one knew really the explanation.  One man had been wild enough to say that some cataclysm had taken place in the centre of the earth....  So she had heard from her nurse; but she was not greatly interested.  It was only tiresome that she could not walk much in the garden, and had to be content with sitting in her own cool shaded room on the second floor.