All night long there was no call or movement, except the opening and shutting of the bedroom door once.  By degrees the light returned into the untidy room.  At six the servants began to move; at seven they crept downstairs into the kitchen; and half an hour later the day began again.

Nevertheless it was not the same as the days that had gone before, although it would have been hard to say in what the difference consisted.  Perhaps it was that they seemed to be waiting for something.  There were certainly fewer things to be done than usual.  People drifted through the drawing-room—­Mr. Flushing, Mr. and Mrs. Thornbury.  They spoke very apologetically in low tones, refusing to sit down, but remaining for a considerable time standing up, although the only thing they had to say was, “Is there anything we can do?” and there was nothing they could do.

Feeling oddly detached from it all, Terence remembered how Helen had said that whenever anything happened to you this was how people behaved.  Was she right, or was she wrong?  He was too little interested to frame an opinion of his own.  He put things away in his mind, as if one of these days he would think about them, but not now.  The mist of unreality had deepened and deepened until it had produced a feeling of numbness all over his body.  Was it his body?  Were those really his own hands?

This morning also for the first time Ridley found it impossible to sit alone in his room.  He was very uncomfortable downstairs, and, as he did not know what was going on, constantly in the way; but he would not leave the drawing-room.  Too restless to read, and having nothing to do, he began to pace up and down reciting poetry in an undertone.  Occupied in various ways—­now in undoing parcels, now in uncorking bottles, now in writing directions, the sound of Ridley’s song and the beat of his pacing worked into the minds of Terence and St. John all the morning as a half comprehended refrain.

     They wrestled up, they wrestled down,
       They wrestled sore and still: 
     The fiend who blinds the eyes of men,
       That night he had his will.

     Like stags full spent, among the bent
       They dropped awhile to rest—­

“Oh, it’s intolerable!” Hirst exclaimed, and then checked himself, as if it were a breach of their agreement.  Again and again Terence would creep half-way up the stairs in case he might be able to glean news of Rachel.  But the only news now was of a very fragmentary kind; she had drunk something; she had slept a little; she seemed quieter.  In the same way, Dr. Lesage confined himself to talking about details, save once when he volunteered the information that he had just been called in to ascertain, by severing a vein in the wrist, that an old lady of eighty-five was really dead.  She had a horror of being buried alive.