Her mother's gentleness stole through Theresa and stayed there: she felt in herself a largeness of forgiveness that astonished her, and she looked on her father without rancour, with the wide gaze, she thought, of one who sees beyond the flesh. And the mood, unnatural, but not false, imposed by another's tenderness, lasted, uninterrupted, for the short time before her mother died. Theresa was glad that inward peace, as well as that outer one of a June night, surrounded the pale, still figure on the bed, as she gave the little sighing breath which lightly sent her spirit across the border, glad that she felt no resentment at her father's tears. She had time to think these things before there came over her a terrible quiet which was not peace but desolation, wherein worlds broke God's rules and changed their course, and, amidst their bewildered going, she thought her mother tried to find a place. Her discarded lodging lay in the bed still bearing the imprint of her spirit, but what was essentially she was racing perilously among uncertain worlds. She steadied herself. She refused to visualise a thing she could not understand, and she found strength. The wandering worlds dropped back into their circuits, she heard the dreadful catch and outlet of her father's breathing, and, as though this were but part of her daily task, she stroked her mother's cold, soft hands, and touched a little wavering lock of hair that had fallen across her brow. She lived and ate, and slept through the medium of a body which had no connection with herself. She would rather have suffered tortures, but she could not regain her personality or any of the emotions it would have felt. While Uncle George went gloomily about the house and Bessie sobbed in the kitchen and Grace lay prone upon her bed, Theresa, feeling ashamed of her coldness, seemed to live a life whose normality was only broken now and then by the sight of a fleeting, ghostlike figure that could not find rest. When she woke in that first night she heard its hurrying, ceaseless steps, and the sound of doors opened by its unbelieving, eager hands, and she knew that her father's body, uninformed by his numbed mind, was searching and researching the house for a living Nancy who would defy the stark evidence of her death. She sat up in bed. Grace was in the deep sleep that follows weeping, and she drew herself carefully out of the sheets, set her feet on the rough carpet of the stairs, and pattered after him. She found him on the landing below, and she touched his sleeve and patted it. "You must go to bed," she said very soothingly. He turned on her, and in the darkness she saw the glistening whites of his eyes. "Whose bed?" he demanded, and again, "Whose bed? I have none," he added on a sob. She had not thought of that. Only the half of Uncle George's couch offered him shelter, and the awful pathos of that carefully preserved space set her chin and her lips trembling.