now Hannah would not have heard her.  Under the storm she had begun to rock, weeping convulsively....  But gradually her weeping ceased.  And to Janet, helplessly watching, this process of congealment was more terrible even than the release that only an unmitigated violence of grief had been able to produce.  In silence Hannah resumed her shrunken duties, and when these were finished sat awhile, before going to bed, her hands lying listless in her lap.  She seemed to have lived for centuries, to have exhausted the gamut of suffering which, save for that one wild outburst, had been the fruit of commonplace, passive, sordid tragedy that knows no touch of fire....

The next morning Janet was awakened by the siren.  Never, even in the days when life had been routine and commonplace, had that sound failed to arouse in her a certain tremor of fear; with its first penetrating shriek, terror invaded her:  then, by degrees, overcoming her numbness, came an agonizing realization of tragedy to be faced.  The siren blew and blew insistently, as though it never meant to stop; and now for the first time she seemed to detect in it a note of futility.  There were those who would dare to defy it.  She, for one, would defy it.  In that reflection she found a certain fierce joy.  And she might lie in bed if she wished —­how often had she longed to!  But she could not.  The room was cold, appallingly empty and silent as she hurried into her clothes.  The dining-room lamp was lighted, the table set, her mother was bending over the stove when she reached the kitchen.  After the pretence of breakfast was gone through Janet sought relief in housework, making her bed, tidying her room.  It was odd, this morning, how her notice of little, familiar things had the power to add to her pain, brought to mind memories become excruciating as she filled the water pitcher from the kitchen tap she found herself staring at the nick broken out of it when Lise had upset it.  She recalled Lise’s characteristically flippant remark.  And there was the streak in the wall-paper caused one night by the rain leaking through the roof.  After the bed was made and the room swept she stood a moment, motionless, and then, opening the drawer in the wardrobe took from it the rose which she had wrapped in tissue paper and hidden there, and with a perverse desire as it were to increase the bitterness consuming her, to steep herself in pain, she undid the parcel and held the withered flower to her face.  Even now a fragrance, faint yet poignant, clung to it....  She wrapped it up again, walked to the window, hesitated, and then with a sudden determination to destroy this sole relic of her happiness went to the kitchen and flung it into the stove.  Hannah, lingering over her morning task of cleaning, did not seem to notice the act.  Janet turned to her.

“I think I’ll go out for a while, mother,” she said.

“You’d ought to,” Hannah replied.  “There’s no use settin’ around here.”