Her mother was in the bathroom, standing by the little box-like cabinet. Her face was pale, of a pasty paleness. She had to keep one hand against the wall to keep from falling. Her eyes were gray and heavy. There was no life in them. A heavy cloud-like film had passed over her eyes. It was like a heavy gray cloud over the blue of the sky. Her body rocked back and forth too. At any moment it might fall. But a short time ago, and even amid the strangeness of the adventure in her father’s bedroom, things had seemed suddenly quite clear. She had understood things she had never understood before. Now nothing could be understood. There was a whirlpool of confused thoughts and actions into which one had been plunged. Now her own body had begun to rock back and forth on the bed. The fingers of her right hand were clutched over the tiny stone her father had given her but she was, at the moment, unaware of the small round hard thing lying in her palm. Her fists kept beating her own body, her own legs and knees. There was something she wanted to do, something it was now right and proper she should do. It was the time now for her to scream, to jump off the bed, to run along the hallway to the bathroom and tear the bathroom door open. Her mother was about to do something one did not passively stand by and see done. She should be crying out at the top of her voice, crying for help. There was a word that should be on her lips now. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” she should now be screaming. Her lips should now be making the word ring through the house. She should be making the house and the street on which the house stood echo and reëcho with the word. And she could say nothing. Her lips were sealed. Her body could not move from the bed. It could only rock back and forth on the bed. Her fancy kept on painting pictures, swift, vivid, terrible pictures. There was, in the bathroom, in the cabinet, a bottle containing a brown liquid and her mother had put up her hand and had got hold of it. Now she had put it to her lips. She had swallowed all the contents of the bottle. The liquid in the bottle was brown, of a reddish brownness. Before she had swallowed it her mother had lighted a gas light. It was directly above her head, as she stood facing the cabinet, and the light from it fell down over her face. There were little puffy red bags of flesh under the eyes and they looked strange and almost revolting against the pasty whiteness of the skin. The mouth was open and the lips were gray too. There was a reddish brown stain running down from one corner of the mouth, down over the chin. Some drops of the liquid had fallen on her mother’s white nightgown. Convulsive spasms, as of pain, passed over the pasty white face. The eyes remained closed. There was a trembling quivering movement of the shoulders.