Clare shivered. She was very tired of waiting.... It was inexplicable that Alwynne should be late; but Clare with a half laugh, promised Alwynne to forego her scolding if she would but come.... The dusk and the wind and the silence were getting on her nerves.... The tick of the hall clock, for instance, was aggressive, insistent, maddening in its precise monotony.... Oh, unbearable! With a gesture that was hysterical in its abandonment, Clare rose suddenly and flung into the hall, plucked open the clock door, and removed the pendulum. The released wire waggled foolishly into silence, like an idiot, tongue a-loll. As the quiet hunted Clare into her sitting-room again, a little silver wire flickered down the sky like a scared snake, and for an instant she saw herself reflected in a convex mirror, a Clare bleached and shining and askew, like a St. Michael in a stained-glass window. Dusk and the thunder followed. The storm was beginning. Clare moved about restlessly. She disliked storms. Her eyes ached, and she was cramped with waiting, and Alwynne had not come. She would, of course.... That woman had detained her, purposely, no doubt, and now there was the storm to delay her.... But Alwynne would come.... Clare smiled securely. Again the lightning whipped across the heavens, and thunder roared in its wake. Clare went to the window and watched the sky. The pane of glass was grateful to her hot forehead. She was too tired, too bruised and shaken by her own recent anger to arrange her thoughts, to pose for the moment, even to herself--of all audiences the most critical. The interview with Elsbeth Loveday rehearsed itself incessantly, pricking, probing, bludgeoning, in crescendo of intonation, innuendo, open attack, to the final triumphant insult. Triumphant, because true. The insult could cut through her defences and strike at her very self, because it was true. Her pride agonised. She had thought herself shrouded, invulnerable. And yet Elsbeth, whom of all women she had reckoned negligible, had guessed, had pitied.... Yet even her enemy was forgotten, as she sat and shuddered at the wound dealt; plucked and shrank, and plucked again at the arrow-tip rankling in it still. The hours had passed in an evil mazement. But Alwynne was to come.... She thought of Alwynne with shifting passions of relief and longing and sheer crude lust for revenge. Alwynne would come.... Alwynne would soothe and comfort, intuitive, never waiting for the cry for help.