Joyce lay in a trance of weariness. A nervous tremolo shivered up and down from her knees to her stomach; her spirit seemed lost and dragged under into the strange circling life of the body, stubborn as that of a tree, that goes on regardless of the mind. I don’t care, she thought, I’m glad I’m alive. She was too inert to close her hot eyes or turn over into the pillow to shut out sounds from her sharpened ears. She heard George’s step on the garden path, Phyllis come downstairs and go to the kitchen. Beneath everything else was the obbligato of the house itself; twinges of loose timbers, the gurgle and rush of plumbing, creak of beds, murmuring voices, soft shut of doors. Tenacious life reluctantly yielding itself to oblivion. Then into this fading recessional came the low sough in the pines, the slackening volleys of the crickets like a besieging army that had withdrawn its troops. And the far-away cry of a train. She imagined it, trailing panes of golden light along the shore, or perhaps darkly curtained sleeping cars partitioned into narrow kennels where mysterious people lay alone: and the bursting silver plume of its whistle, spirting into the cool night, tearing a jagged rent in silence, shaking the whole membrane of elastic air that enveloped them all, a vibration that came undulating over the glittering bay, over the lonely beaches, trembled beside her and went throbbing away.... She hadn’t been down to the beach yet, past the rolling dunes that gave her childhood a first sense of fatal solitude. She tried to remember how that shore looked: wideness, sharp air, the exact curved triangle of sails leaning into unseen sweetness of breeze, steep slides of sand over-tufted above by toppling clumps of grass. If one could escape down there and go bathing in moonlight; come back cleansed, triumphant. * * * * * The whisper at the window sill startled her. She knew Bunny at once. “You must get him away. Before it’s too late, before he knows.” Joyce understood perfectly; so perfectly it didn’t seem necessary to say anything. This was just what she had been telling herself. She nodded. “I kept calling him while you were all in the living room. I was here at this window. He won’t listen. He thinks I’m just teasing him.” Joyce remembered Martin closing the door. “Then I called _you_. I was so afraid you wouldn’t hear me. It’s awful to be helpless.” “Bunny, you’re not helpless. Tell me what to do.” “What room is he in?” “I don’t know. Yes, I do, I think it’s at the end of the passage, next the bath.” “The old nursery. Oh, if I could come indoors. I can’t; they’ve forgotten me.” “We’ll manage,” Joyce whispered. “I always knew you and I would have to help each other.” “He must find something to take him back. You are the one who can help.” Joyce knew there was some secret here too beautiful to be said. Bunny could not tell her, it must be guessed. “Is it something I gave him?”