She had at last, after some three days of such nerve-sickness, taken something to assist sleep. But the small hours found her, in spite of all, awake and staring into the dark, with her troubled mind harping upon the same chords. She sat up in bed, old sorrows bleeding afresh with the new; she took her confused head between her hands, and was voicing the unreconcilement of millions before her and to follow: "Why is everything I love made into an instrument to punish me? What have I done? Why all this senseless pain and calamity to me? Why to me one after the other two losses such as, coming singly in a life, would be enough to darken the sun? Are you, stupid blind Fate, weaving a pattern in which the same design must repeat itself? For is it justice that twice I should have the thing my heart had grown around taken from me, and not in the terrible legitimate way of death, but just placed out of reach and sight, while I torture myself with wondering what may be happening to make the beloved suffer?... Oh, Larry, why ... why this dismay inseparable from the thought of you?" The torture of the visions of Larry which, spite of her shuddering repudiation, would obtrude themselves, was such now that even in her morbid mood she recognized something disproportionate in it, and had clear-sightedness to attribute it to a reaction from the narcotic. She tried to get herself more normally awake. She strained her eyes to see the figures upon her watch, and a sort of patience fell upon her, ascertaining that in an hour or so it would begin to be day, by the light of which the worst never appears quite so unendurable. She felt cold now, and drawing up her quilt went through the forlorn mockery of composing herself to sleep. Perhaps for a moment without knowing it she dozed, for when the barking of Beech, who slept in the laundry, roused her with a start, it was certainly lighter, she could distinguish the vine-branches against her window. The muffled bark of lugubrious timbre came again and again, deadened by distance and doors. The shock of the first outburst--her heart had seemed to roll over--had plunged Celia into what we call, when children suffer it, a fit of the horrors. Twitching, she sat up again, and receiving from Beech's voice, as his angry barks multiplied, a message of warning, she kept her eyes instinctively fixed upon the square of light.