She even once caught herself wondering what the Dutchman’s duppy would look like, all bloody, with its head turned backwards on its shoulders and clanking a chain ... it was a momentary flash, the way the banished image of Tabby had come back to her. For a moment her head reeled: in another she was far from Jamaica, far from the schooner, far from duppies, on a golden throne in the remotest East. The other children were no longer allowed in the cabin to visit her: but when she heard their feet scampering overhead, she often conversed with them in loud yells. One of these yells from above told her: ‘Marghie’s back, you know.’ ‘O-oh.’ After that Emily was silent for a bit, her beautiful, innocent grey eyes fixed on the ear of a dwarf at the end of her bunk. Only the slight pucker at the top of her nose showed with what intensity she was thinking: and the minute drops of sweat on her temples. But it was not only when there was some outward occasion, like this, that she suffered acute distress. Froth as she might, those times of consciousness, which had begun with a moment of such sublime vision, were both growing on her and losing their lustre. They were become sinister. Life threatened to be no longer an incessant, automatic discharge of energy: more and more often, and when least expected, all that would suddenly drop from her, and she would remember that she was _Emily_, who had killed ... and who was _here_ ... and that Heaven alone knew what was going to happen to the incompetent little thing, by what miracle she was going to keep her end up.... Whenever this happened, her stomach seemed to drop away within her a hundred and fifty feet. She, like Laura, had one foot each side of a threshold now. As a piece of Nature, she was practically invulnerable. But as _Emily_, she was absolutely naked, tender. It was particularly cruel that this transition should come when so fierce a blast was blowing. For mark this: any one in bed, with a blanket up to her chin, is in a measure safe. She might go through abysms of terror; but once these passed, no practical harm had been done. But once she was up and about? Suppose it was at some crisis, some call to action, that her Time came on her? What appalling blunder could she fail to make? Oh why must she grow up? Why, for pity’s sake?