She laughed until the tears poured down her cheeks, but her eyes protested, looking piteously and in dismay from the studied glass. She knew that she was laughing with shrill high cries, and behind her horror at her collapse there was a desperate protesting attempt to calm herself, driven, above all, upon her agitated heart by the fear lest her husband should come in and discover her. The laughter ceased quite suddenly and was followed by a rush of tears. She cried as though her heart would break, then, with trembling steps, crossed to her bed and lay down. Very shortly she must control herself because the dinner-bell would ring and she must go. To stay and send the conventional excuse of a headache would bring her husband up to her, and although he was so full of his own affairs that the questions that he would ask her would be perfunctory and absent-minded, she felt that she could not endure, just now, to be alone with him. She lay on her bed shivering and wondering what malign power it was that had seized her. Malign it was, she did not for an instant doubt. She had asked, did ask, for so little. Only to see Morris for a moment every day. To see him anywhere in as public a place as you please, but to see him, to hear his voice, to look into his eyes, to touch his hand (soft and gentle like a woman's hand)--that had been now for months an absolute necessity. She did not ask more than that, and yet she was aware that there was no pause in the accumulating force of the passion that was seizing her. She was being drawn along by two opposite powers--the tenderness of protective maternal love and the ruthlessness of the lust for possession. She wanted to care for him, to watch over him, to guard him, to do everything for him, and also she wanted to feel her hold over him, to see him move, almost as though he were hypnotised, towards her. The thought of him, the perpetual incessant thought of him, ruled out the thought of every one else in the world--save only Falk. She scarcely now considered her husband at all; she never for an instant wondered whether people in the town were talking. She saw only Morris and her future with Morris--only that and Falk. Upon Falk now everything hung. She had made a kind of bargain. If Falk stayed and loved her and cared for her she would resist the power that was drawing her towards Morris. Now, a million times more than before she had met Morris, she must have some one for whom she could care. It was as though a lamp had been lit and flung a great track of light over those dark, empty earlier years. How could she ever have lived as she did? The hunger, the desperate, eager, greedy hunger was roused in her. Falk could satisfy it, but, if he would not, then she would hesitate no longer.