welled like a balloon,
its whiskers distended like wire. She knew that her eyes were burning,
that her forehead was cold, and that she felt sick. She was hungry, and
at the same time was conscious that she could eat nothing. Her only
wish was to creep away and hide herself from every one.

However, through all her confusion she was aware of her determination
not to betray to them that she was ill. "If only the cat wouldn't grow
so fast, I believe I could manage," was her desperate thought. There
was a roaring in her ears; she caught suddenly from an infinite
distance the voice of the stout young man--"She's ill! She's fainting!"

She was aware that she struggled to face him with fierce protesting
eyes. The next thing she knew was that she lay for the second time that
afternoon in his arms. She felt that he laid her, clumsily but gently,
upon the sofa; some one sprinkled cold water on her forehead. Deep down
in her soul she hated and despised herself for this weakness before
strangers. She closed her eyes tightly, desiring to conceal not so much
the others as herself from her scornful gaze. She heard some one say
something about a cup of tea, and she wanted it suddenly with a
desperate, fiery desire, but she would not speak, no, not if they were
to torture her with thirst for days and days--to that extent at least
she could preserve her independence.

She heard her Aunt Elizabeth say something like: "Poor
thing--strain--last week--father--too much."

She gathered all her energies together to say "It hasn't been too much.
I'm all right," but they brought her a cup of tea, and before that she
succumbed. She drank it with eager greed, then lay back, her eyes
closed, and slowly the bars of hot iron withdrew from her forehead. She
slept.

She woke to a room wrapped in a green trembling twilight. She was alone
save for the black cat. The fire crackled, the gas was turned low, and
the London murmur beyond the window was like the hum of an organ. There
was no one in the room; she felt, as she lay there, an increasing
irritation at her weakness. She was afraid too for her future. Did she
faint like this at the earliest opportunity people would allow her no
chance of earning her living. Where was that fine independent life upon
which, outside Borhedden Farm, she had resolved? And these people, her
aunts, the young man, the thin spectacled man, what would they think of
her? They would name it affectation, perhaps, and imagine