She tidied her hair, and fetching the sponge and towel stood before the glass, trying to trim her marred face into some semblance of composure. The boys would be clamouring--and one never knew.... There might be tainted food--a loose baluster--a tag of carpet.... He had his ways.... She must not baulk Him.... She went downstairs. The children were tired and cross and quarrelsome--the heat had soured even cheerful Mrs. Denny. It was not a pleasant meal. But it could not oppress Louise. Outwardly docile and attentive, her mind had withdrawn into itself and sat aloof, inviolate, surveying its surroundings much as it would have watched the actors in a moving picture. She was impervious to bickerings and querulous comment. What did it matter? She would never have tea with them again.... She was going away from it all.... If only God did not forget.... All through the breathless evening she awaited His pleasure. Long after the house was quiet, and Mrs. Denny tucking up her children, had come and gone, Louise lay wakeful--still waiting. It was an airless night. Every other moment the little unaccountable noises of a sleeping building broke the warm silence. Shadows scurried across the counterpane and over her face like ghostly mice, as the trees outside her window bent and nodded to a radiant moon. She was weary to the point of exhaustion. Momently her body seemed to shrink away from her into the depths of the bed--warm, fathomless depths--leaving her essential self to float free and uncontained. She would resign herself luxuriously to the sensation of disintegration, but with maddening regularity her next breath clicked body and soul together anew. Yet, as she drowsed, the space between breath and breath lengthened slowly, till they lay divided by incredible æons in which her thoughts wandered and lost themselves, grew hoar and died and were born again; while the dead-weight of her body sank ever deeper into sleep, was recalled to consciousness with ever increasing effort.