Down one page, line by line, on through the next, still line by line, her eyes travelled steadily, mechanically; and then, as mechanically, her hand moved, turned the leaf, and her eyes moved on again. But unless her face greatly belied her, the sense of the words she read so intently never penetrated to her brain. By-and-by that movement of her eyes ceased; she sat staring fixedly at the page before her; then she let the hand that held the book sink gradually on her knee, and sat staring into space as she had sat staring at the printed words. Her face was drawn, and there was an intense, indefinite dread about it which was none the less ghastly in that it would have been impossible to say in which of her set features its shadow lurked. The room was absolutely still. Outside the rain fell and the wind moaned. Inside the intense quiet seemed to be taking a weirdly tangible form, and to be creeping closer and closer round her motionless figure with every breath she drew. With a sudden, sharp movement, as though, in taking a too sharply piercing point, her thoughts had roused her to a desperate resistance of them, she rose, and began to walk restlessly up and down the room. Her brows were drawn to a concentration which made her whole face look thin and very old. There was an expression of deliberate, self-conscious self-contempt about her mouth, but in her eyes there lurked the battling horror against which all her force seemed to be fiercely arrayed. Up and down she walked, no muscle of her set face relaxing; until, quite suddenly, there swept across it, breaking up all its rigid lines, a very agony of yearning. It was as though some sudden and most inopportune realisation, in no wise to be resisted, had shaken her through and through. “If only I had dared to ask him! If only, if only I dared to speak!” The words had broken from her half aloud, a sharp, low cry, and as she uttered them she stopped in her walk, gripping and clinging to a chair as if for physical support in a moment of terrible mental conflict. She was evidently fighting desperately inch by inch for the self-control which was slipping from her; the self-control which she dreaded to lose as she dreaded nothing else in life; the self-control to which she clung with the tenacity of instinctive self-preservation.