Immense beating of the wings, the sound drumming in her ears; seven years rolled up as a stage-curtain discloses a scene, and she saw the room in the Holloway road, herself kneeling there and Audrey's voice: "... and then said 'I am Lady Burdon' ... O Maggie! O Maggie! ... and I said 'Oh, how can you be Lady Burdon?' ... Maggie! Maggie!" The beating wings drove up to a pitch they had never before reached. Through their tumult--buffeted, as it were, by their fury--and from the scene in which she saw herself, she looked up and saw Lady Burdon smiling there, and heard Lady Burdon's voice: "Good morning, I am Lady Burdon." Again, as in the great hall with Rollo, if it did not stop!--if it did not stop!--if it did not stop! she must cry out: "You are not! You said that to Audrey and killed her! Now--" And again, and this time when the terrible fluttering had almost beaten itself free and she had formed her lips to release it, it suddenly stopped. As at the bedside, seven years before, she fell from paroxysm of passion to unnatural calm, so now she was returned to her normal, quiet self, content to wait, and she said quite quietly: "Percival told me to expect you." Lady Burdon advanced pleasantly. "Ah, and I hope he also remembered to tell you of my apologies. I am afraid we kept him with us much too long last night." She looked around the room with the air of one willing to chat and to be entertained, and Miss Oxford, murmuring there was no occasion for apology, advanced a chair with: "Please sit down, if you will. This is very humble, I am afraid. It is only the post-office, you know; and only a toy post-office at that." She was quite herself again. Through this interview, and always thereafter when she met Lady Burdon or thought of her, she was invested with the calmness that had come to her by the death-bed. She knew quite certainly that she had only to wait. She was not at all anxious. She knew she could wait. She only feared--now for the first time, and increasingly as the attacks became more frequent--that an onset of that dreadful fluttering might descend upon her and might not go before it had driven her to wreck the plan for which she waited--Percival, not she, to avenge his mother.