"Winnie! My darling! You are sobbing your heart out!" Mrs. Price's black-clothed body trembled and her precise voice shook. She laid her blue-veined hand on Winnie's wrist. But Winnie could not tell. She glanced up, her little face dim with despair. "Winnie! Are you in pain? Shall I call the doctor again? Winnie, my darling! Dear child, answer me! You must not act like this!" But Winnie buried her head in pillows and would not reply. She had wept out all she wanted to say. She was sodden. She was still. There was nothing left in her but silence. Mrs. Price, tears of anxiety in her eyes, gripped Winnie's wrists and held them tight. They were still together. The wooden clock ticked on the low mantel. Then Mrs. Price said, "Winnie, if you cannot manage to tell me what is the matter I shall telegraph your father." Crushed against Mrs. Price's finality, Winnie struggled to free herself. "I want to die! Oh, I want to die!" she said, and every time she said "die," something in her shouted against the dumbness of her throat, life, life! The shriek was against Laurence and against the living child that had come to consume her. Mrs. Price shivered as with cold, but she tried to be calm. "Winnie," speaking very low, "you _must_ use some self-control. Something terrible has happened. You have heard something from home which you have not told me. I am your mother. I love you better than anything in the world, and you have no right to keep me in ignorance of anything that is troubling you." Her lips were bluish and her upper lip was wet with sweat. The skin on her hands was withered like white crêpe and the veins swelled in her trembling wrists. The clock ticked. Winnie murmured something in the pillow. Mrs. Price waited. Outside the open window the evening air congealed in heaviness. It hung cold and bitter over the moist grass. The smell of weeds floated into the room. Mrs. Price looked out and saw that each stalk of golden rod in the meadow opposite was separately still. The sky was blue stone. Only the pine trees seemed warm against the vacuous shining of twilight. For night was terrible, descending in brightness. It was a mirror in the pale still sky. It was nothing. Slowly the darkness grew up from the earth, and, as the trees darkened, the earth began to grow into being. Winnie was glad of the darkness. When the room grew dark she did not hold the child separately in her body. It lay with her in the body of the dark and she was freed of it. "Mamma!" She sat up, her body a harsh gray stroke of determination against the white inert pillow. "Yes, my dear." Mrs. Price smoothed her child's brow. "Oh, I am so glad you are quieter, Winnie." Out of the silence from which the sun had passed the moon suddenly unrolled, huge and white and dry as a dead flower. A dragon-fly darting across the window and the dry white face of the moon, so gorgeously lifeless, was a gold thorn sinking into the quiet flesh of shadow.