“I can not release you.  Take time to think before you ask it.  Go to sleep now and do not act hastily.”  He stood between her and the window, wishing to get some word to which he could hold.

Julia’s two black eyes grew brighter.  “I see.  You took advantage of my trouble, and you want to hold me to my words, and you are bad, and now—­now I hate you!” Then Julia felt better.  Hate is the only wholesome thing in such a case.  She pushed him aside vigorously, stepped upon the settee, slipped in at the window, and closed it.  She drew the curtain, but it seemed thin, and with characteristic impulsiveness she put out her light that she might have the friendly drapery of darkness about her.  She heard the soft—­for the first time it seemed to her stealthy—­tread of Humphreys, as he returned to his room.  Whether she swooned or whether she slept after that she never knew.  It was morning without any time intervening, she had a headache and could scarcely walk, and there was August’s note lying on the floor.  She read it again—­if not with more intelligence, at least with more suspicion.  She wondered at her own hastiness.  She tried to go about the house, but the excitement of the previous night, added to all she had suffered beside, had given her a headache, blinding and paralyzing, that sent her back to bed.

[Illustration:  “NOW I HATE YOU!”]

And there she lay in that half-asleep, half-awake mood, which a nervous headache produces.  She seemed to be a fly in a web, and the spider was trying to fasten her.  A very polite spider, with that smile which went half-way up his face but which never seemed able to reach his eyes.  He had straps to his pantaloons, and a reddish mustache, and she shuddered as he wound his fine webs about her.  She tried to shake off the illusion.  But the more absurd an illusion, the more it will not be shaken off.  For see! the spider was kissing her hand!  Then she seemed to have made a great effort and to have broken the web.  But her wings were torn, and her feet were shackled by the fine strands that still adhered.  She could not get them off.  Wouldn’t somebody help her, even as she had many a time picked off the webs from a fly’s feet out of sheer pity?  And all day she would perpetually return into these half-conscious states and feel the spider’s web about her feet, and ask over and over again if somebody wouldn’t help her to get out of the meshes.

Toward evening her mother brought her a cup of tea and a piece of toast, and for the first time in the remembered life of the daughter made an endeavor to show a little tenderness for her.  It was a clumsy endeavor, for when the great gulf is once fixed between mother and child it is with difficulty bridged.  And finding herself awkward in the new role, Mrs. Anderson dropped it and resumed her old gait, remarking, as she closed the door, that she was glad to know that Julia was coming to her senses, and “had took the right road.”  For Mrs. Abigail was more vigorous than grammatical.