She felt her pulse whirling with an excitement that made her lean against the wall, as he took a great stride towards her, crying out, "Oh, make an end . . . make an end of this. . . ." The door behind him opened, and Elly ran in, red-faced and dusty. "Mother, Mother, Reddy has come off her nest. And there are twelve hatched out of the fourteen eggs! Mother, they are such darlings! I wish you'd come and see. Mother, if I practise _good_, won't you come afterwards and look at them?" "You should say 'practise well,' not 'good,'" said Marise, her accent openly ironical. The wind, precursor of the storm falling suddenly on the valley, shook the trees till they roared. Over the child's head she exchanged with Vincent Marsh a long reckless look, the meaning of which she made no effort to understand, the abandon of which she made no effort to restrain. With a dry, clattering, immediate rattle, without distance or dignity, the thunder broke threateningly over the house. CHAPTER XVI MASSAGE-CREAM; THEME AND VARIATIONS July 20. The hardest thing for Eugenia about these terribly hard days of suspense was to keep her self-control in her own room. Of course for her as for any civilized being, it was always possible to keep herself in hand with people looking on. But for years she had not had to struggle so when alone, for poise and self-mastery. Her room at the Crittendens', which had been hers so long, and which Marise had let her furnish with her own things, was no longer the haven of refuge it had been from the bitter, raw crudity of the Vermont life. She tried to fill the empty hours of Neale's daily absences from the house with some of the fastidious, delicate occupations of which she had so many, but they seemed brittle in her hot hands, and broke when she tried to lean on them. A dozen times a day she interrupted herself to glance with apprehension at her reflection in the mirror, the Florentine mirror with the frame of brown wood carved, with the light, restrained touch of a good period, into those tasteful slender columns. And every time she looked, she was horrified and alarmed to see deep lines of thought, of hope, of impatience, of emotion, criss-crossing fatally on her face.