She must not allow herself to be so easily frightened.  She had been thinking too many months of the one thing; she could not see it fairly.  Why, Magsie had been infinitely more dangerous in the early days of her success; there was nothing to fear from the simple, apprehensive Magsie of this afternoon!  The only sensible thing was to stop thinking of it, and to go to sleep.  But Rachael felt sick and frightened, experienced sensations of faintness, sensations like hunger.  Her eyes seemed painfully open, she could not shut them.  Her breath came fitfully.  She sighed, turned on her side.  She would count one hundred, breathing deep and with closed eyes.  “Sixteen, seventeen!” Rachael sat suddenly erect, and looked at her watch again.  Twenty-two minutes past three.

Morning broke with wind and rain; the new leaves in the square were tossing wildly; sleet struck noisily against the windows.  Rachael, waking exhausted, after not more than an hour’s sleep, went through the process of dressing in a weary daze.  The boys, as was usual, came in during the hour, full of fresh conversation and eager to discuss plans for the day.  Jim tied strings from knob to knob of her bureau drawers, Derry amused himself by dashing a chain of glass beads against the foot of the bed until the links gave and the tiny balls rolled in every direction over the floor.

“Never mind,” Rachael consoled the discomfited junior, “Pauline will come in and pick them all up.  Mother doesn’t care!”

Derry, however, howled on unconsoled, and Rachael, stopping, half-dressed, to take him in her arms, mused while she kissed him over the tiny sorrow that could so convulse him.  Was she no more than a howling baby robbed of a toy?  Nothing could be more real than Derry’s sense of loss, no human being could weep more desolately or more unreasonably.  Were her love and her life no more than a string of baubles, scattered and flung about by some irresponsible hand?  Was nothing real except the great moving sea and the arch of stars above the spring nights?  Life and death, and laughter and tears, how unimportant they were!  Eight years ago she had felt herself to be unhappy; now she knew that in those days she had known neither sorrow nor joy.  Since then, what an ecstasy of fulfilled desire had been hers!  She had lived upon the heights, she had tasted the fullest and the sweetest of human emotions.  What other woman—­Cleopatra, Helen, all the great queens of countries and of art—­had known more exquisite delight than hers had been in those first days when she had waited for Warren to come to her with violets?

The morning went on like an ugly dream.  At nine o’clock Rachael sent down an untouched breakfast tray.  Mary took the boys out into the struggling sunshine.  The house was still.

Rachael lay on her wide couch, staring wretchedly into space.  Her head ached.  The moonfaced clock struck a slow ten, the hall clock downstairs following it with a brisk silver chime.  Vendors in the square called their wares; the first carts of potted spring flowers were going their rounds.