Then, suddenly, her mood changed; their power was frightening no longer,
they were wholly benignant and life-giving. It was not an earthquake
shock that had frightened her, it was but the first beam of some
new-rising sun that had struck on to the darkness of the world in which
she had lived till now. She was smitten "by the first beam from the
springing East," she who had never known before what morning was, or how
fair was the light which it pours on to the world. And this morning beam
was for her; it had not struck her fortuitously, shedding its light on
her and others without choice. It had come to shine into her window,
choosing that above all others. It was she that the first beam sought.
It came to gild and glorify her house, her body and mind, the place
where her soul dwelt.

How blind she had been! There was no difference in him; the difference
had been in her alone. She had sat with sealed eyes at her window, or,
at the most, with eyes that could but see the shadows and not the sun.
Now they saw the sun only; there were no shadows, for the shadows had
been but her own blindness.

Dawn was in the sky outside; here in the quiet, white-curtained room
another dawn had come, not quiet, but with gleam of sun alternating with
cloud and tempest, making the beholder wonder what the day would bring
forth.

* * * * *

Aunt Jeannie, too, had lain long awake, but when sleep came it came
deeply and dreamlessly, demanding the repair of two nights in the
train and the agitation of her talk. She had given orders that she was
not to be called till she rang, and when she woke the sun was already
high, and the square outside lively with passengers and traffic. But
it was with a sense of coming trial and trouble, if not quite of
disaster, that she woke.

It was disaster she had to avert; she had to think and scheme. But had
she known of Daisy's sleepless night, and the cause of that, she would
have felt that the anchor which prevented the situation drifting into
disaster had been torn up. For the anchor was the belief, as Lady
Nottingham had told her, that Daisy was not in love with Tom Lindfield,
and by one of fate's little ironies, at the very moment when she was
comforting herself last night with that thought it was true no longer.

Her sleep had quite restored her, giving vigour to her body and the
power of cool reflection to her brain, and when Victor came, according
to promise, to see h