dressing-table by the window as if she were treading on air, she stood holding its edge in the darkness. Two forgotten incidents flowed past her in quick succession; one of waking up on her seventh birthday in the seaside villa alone in a small dark room and suddenly saying to herself that one day her father and mother would die and she would still be there, and after a curious moment when the darkness seemed to move against her, feeling very old and crying bitterly, and another of standing in the bow of the dining-room window at Barnes looking at the raindrops falling from the leaves through the sunshine and saying to Eve, who came into the room as she watched, “D’you know, Eve, I feel as if I’d suddenly wakened up out of a dream.” The bedroom was no longer dark. She could see the outlines of everything in the light coming from the street lamps through the half-closed Venetian blinds. Beadie sighed and stirred. Miriam began impatiently preparing for bed without lighting the gas. “What’s the use of feeling like that if it doesn’t stay? It doesn’t change anything. Next time I’ll make it stay. It might whisk me right away. There’s something in me that can’t be touched or altered. Me. If it comes again. If it’s stronger every time.... Perhaps it goes on getting stronger till you die.” CHAPTER IV 1 Wheezing, cook had spread a plaster of dampened ashy cinders upon the basement schoolroom fire and gone bonily away across the oilcloth in her heelless boots. As the door closed Miriam’s eye went up from her book to the little slope of grass showing above the concrete wall of the area. The grass gleamed along the edge of a bank of mist. In the mist the area railings stood hard and solid against the edge of empty space. Several times she glanced at the rich green, feeling that neither ‘emerald,’ ‘emerald velvet,’ nor ‘velvety enamel’ quite expressed it. She had not noticed that there was a mist shutting in and making brilliant the half-darkness of the room at breakfast-time, only feeling that for some reason it was a good day. “It’s fog--there’s a sort of fog,” she said, glowing. The fog made the room with the strange brilliant brown light on the table, on the horsehair chairs, on the shabby length of brown and yellow oilcloth running out to the bay of the low window, seem to be rushing through space, alone. It was quite safe, going on its journey--towards some great good.