When Emily went to her room, she sat at her dressing-table a moment looking at her own reflection, until her features became so strange that a fear of insanity haunted her, and then she half undressed and lay down upon her bed. She told herself that she could not sleep that night, and yet, after her first burst of tears she fell into the sound and natural slumber of grief-stricken youth with its vague apologetic hope that the whitened hair will show in the morning. Far in the night she awoke with a strange ignorance of time and place. She shivered with the chill of the night air. Rain was falling and she heard the lace curtains at the windows scraping in the wind against the heavy leaves of a fern she was nurturing, and with a woman's intuitive dread of the damage rain may do when windows are open, she arose to close them. The cool air swept in upon her, driving the fine mist of the rain, but she let it spray a moment upon her face, upon her breast, before she pulled her window down. Outside the yard lay in blackness, and she looked down on it long enough to distinguish all its familiar objects, each bush and shrub and tree; she saw the lawn mower stranded by the walk and she thought how her father would scold old Jasper in the morning; and then she thought it strange and unreal that she could think of such irrelevant things at such a time. Yet every material thing was aggressively normal; the electric light swinging and creaking at the corner of Ohio Street with the rain slanting across the ovoid of light that clung around it showed that; everything the same--yet all changed with her. She turned from her window. The darkness indoors was kind, it seemed to hide the wound that had been dealt her, and she hastily undressed and got to bed, curling up like a little child. Then she lay and tried to think, until her head ached. She had been thinking thus ever since the cruel moment that afternoon when she had picked up the _News_ on the veranda. Her heart had been light that day. She had thought of Jerome as he traveled in his private car with a coming president. She had gone with him to Lincoln, and seen him riding through the crowded streets; had beheld him in the flare of torches, his face alight with the inspiration of an orator, his eyes fine and sparkling, as she had so often seen them blazing with another passion; had heard his ringing voice, and the cheers of the frantic people, massed in that remembered square. And so in the afternoon she became impatient for the cry the boy gave when he tossed the local papers on the floor of the veranda. She had swooped down on them before the boy had turned his little back and mounted his wheel. And the thing that first struck her eye had smitten her heart still--the headlines bearing Garwood's name. She had caught at the newel post in the wide hall to keep from falling.