But Jim had not yet arrived. Seven days passed, and the eighth night since the buccaneer's release closed in. Leah felt the strain terribly, and hardly ate or slept. Hilda did what she could to cheer her up, but, not knowing the whole truth, could do very little. Lady Jim declined to take drugs, as her last experience of these had shown her how they aged people, though that might have been her fancy. All she could do, and did do, was to keep a tight rein on her emotions, and beyond looking pale, and a trifle haggard, no one could have told that she was in any way disturbed. Joan was a great comfort to her in those days of strain, and so was Lionel, with his prophecies that all would yet be well. But Leah had no one to whom she could tell the whole shocking truth, and it was desperately trying to a woman, whose nervous system was almost wrecked, to hold her tongue. These still waters were running very deep. She found a certain relief in motion, and while Hilda wept and wailed that the bodies of her dear husband and his father had never been cast ashore for Christian burial, Leah's motor-car tore round the country through storm and sunshine. She would not even take a chauffeur, but engineered the machine herself. Providence, or the fetish that stood to her in place of it, watched over her escapades. She met with no accident, not even the most trivial, although in her reckless driving she did her best to reduce the car to match-wood. Like a witch on a broomstick she flew round the country, frantic and insistent, as though she sought the enjoyment of some wizard Sabbath. The motor flung mile after mile behind, with a buzz and a hum, and the speed of a destroyer buffeting a rough sea. Leah, with her hand on the levers, swooped down narrow lanes, spun furiously along the King's highway, crashed through scared villages, and raced the setting sun to the verge of the astonished lands. It was the extreme danger of these flights which delighted and strengthened her; and if she had a large bill to pay for breaking every known law in the county policemen's note-books, it was easy for the Duchess of Pentland to pay for such frolics. The thrill, the dash, the knowledge of power, the governance of a flying bomb-shell--these things were worth double, treble, quadruple the money. She was inebriated with danger, exalted by the constant nearness of death, and, like a she-Satan, defiantly self-sufficient, scorned both God and man. Of woman, needless to say, she took no account whatsoever.