Her tether had stretched; it had given her inches; but this was the end of it. She did not see, herself, now, any more than Nina or Jane or Tanqueray saw, how she was to go on. She did not know how, for instance, she was to face the terrible question of finance. For the last six months she had not written any paragraphs. Even if Papa had not made it impossible for her to write them, her head and all the ideas in it were giving out. She had lost her job. She was living precariously on translation, which could be done, she maintained, when you hadn't any head at all. She would get twenty pounds for it, and there would be forty, perhaps, for the book which she had been sitting up to write. She did not know where the money for next year was coming from; and there were the doctor and the chemist now to pay for poor Papa. The doctor and the chemist had not cured him of his dreams. The dreams were incessant, and they were more horrid than they had ever been. She hadn't slept for fear of the opening of the door, and the sound of the slow feet shuffling to her bedside, and the face that took on more and more the likeness of the horrors that he dreamed. The dreams, she had gathered, were a very bad sign. She had been told that she must be on the look-out; she must not leave him. She knew what that meant. Her fear might take shape any day or any night. Last night she had moved her bed into his room. The doctor had looked grave when she told him what she had done. There should be, he said, an attendant for the night. To be on the look-out night and day were too much for any woman. She should husband her strength, for she would want it. She was in for a very long strain. For the old man's bodily health was marvellous. He might last like that for another ten years, and, with care, for longer. Nina had been drawn apart into the inner room to receive this account of Mr. Gunning. She was shocked by the change she found in her little friend. The Kiddy was very thin. Her pretty, slender neck was wasted, and her childlike wrists were flattened to the bone. A sallow tint was staining her whiteness. Her hair no longer waved in its low curves; it fell flat and limp from the parting. Her eyes, strained, fixed in their fear, showed a rim of white. Her mouth was set tight in defiance of her fear. Nina noticed that there was a faint, sagging mark on either side of it. "Kiddy," she said, "how _will_ you----?" "I don't know. My brain's all woolly and it won't think." Laura closed her eyes; a way she had when she faced terror. "Nina, it was horrible yesterday. I caught myself wishing----Oh no, I don't; I didn't; I couldn't; it was something else, not me. It couldn't have been me, could it?" "No, Kiddy, of course it couldn't." "I don't know. I feel sometimes as if I could be awful. Yesterday, I did a cruel thing to him. I took his newspaper away from him." She stared, agonized, as if her words were being wrenched from her with each turn of a rack.