She turned helplessly within herself, wondering how she should begin to think--and where. She wondered idly if this was how soldiers felt, when a shell had blown them to pieces? She wondered how they collected themselves afterwards? Where did they begin? Did an arm pick up the legs and head, or how? The picture thus conjured up struck her as excessively funny. She began to giggle. The mistress's astonished voice roused her to the necessity for self-control. She picked up her pen. The thoughts flowed more clearly--yes, like ink in a pen. So it had come. All along she had known that she must have failed: known it from the day of the examination itself. The burden of that knowledge had been upon her for weeks like a secret guilt. Daily she had gone to prayers in cold fear, thinking: "Now--now--now--they will read it out." Daily she had studied Clare's face, to each change of expression, each abstraction or transient sternness, her heart beating out its one thought: "She had heard! she knows!" And yet behind her academic certainty of failure had lain a little illogical hope. There was just a chance--an examiner more kind than just ... a spilled ink-bottle ... an opportune fire. The child in her could still pray for miracles, for help from fairyland, and half believe it on the way. And now the daily terrors, the daily reliefs, were alike over. Louise, who had learned, as she thought, to do without hope these many weeks, realised pitifully her self-deception. This hopelessness, this dead weight of certainty, was a new burden--a Sisyphus rock which would never roll for her. She was at the end. Her mind, for all its forced and hot-house development, had, in matters of raw fact, the narrow outlook of the schoolgirl, superimposed upon the passions, the more intense for their utter innocence, of the child. Her sense of proportion, that latest developed and most infallible sign of maturity, was embryonic. The examination, so intrinsically unimportant, appeared to her a Waterloo. She could not see beyond it. Clare, inexplicably altering, daily sterner and more indifferent, save for stray gleams of whimsical kindness, that stung and maddened the child by their sweetness and rarity, would, Louise considered, be effectually alienated. But Louise could not conceive life possible without Clare. The future was a night of black misery, without a hint of dawn. CHAPTER XX The morning wore to an end. Clare had come in at the mid-morning break to announce that the dress rehearsal would take place on the afternoon of the following day. All costumes were to be ready. The day-girls were to lunch at the school. She was brief and businesslike, inaccessible to questions. She did not look at Louise.