ive neither
credence nor respect. His entire concern was for Sir Walter, not Mr.
May. He could not sleep, lighted a pipe, considered whether it was in
his power to do anything, felt a sudden impulse to take certain steps,
yet hesitated--from no fear to himself, but doubt whether action might
not endanger another. Mary did not sleep either, and she suffered more,
for she had never approved, and now she blamed herself not a little for
her weak opposition. A thousand arguments occurred to her while she lay
awake. Then, for a time, she forgot present tribulations, and her own
grief overwhelmed her, as it was wont to do by night. For while the
events that had so swiftly followed each other since her husband's death
banished him now and again, save from her subconscious mind, when alone
he was swift to return and her sorrow made many a night sleepless. She
was herself ill, but did not know it. The reaction had yet to come, and
could not be long delayed, for her nervous energy was worn out now.
She wept and lived days with the dead; then the present returned to her
mind, and she fretted and prayed--for Septimus May and for daylight. She
wondered why stormy nights were always the longest. She heard a
thousand unfamiliar sounds, and presently leaped from her bed, put on a
dressing-gown, and crept out into the house. To know that all was well
with the watcher would hearten her. But then her feet dragged before
she had left the threshold of her own room, and she stood still and
shuddered a little. For how if all were not well? How if his voice no
longer sounded?

She hesitated to make the experiment, and balanced the relief of
reassurance against the horror of silence. She remembered a storm at
sea, when through a long night, not lacking danger to a laboring steamer
with weak engines, she had lain awake and felt her heart warm again when
the watch shouted the hour.

She set out, then, determined to know if all prospered with her
father-in-law. Nor would she give ear to misgiving or ask herself what
she would do if no voice were steadily uplifted in the Grey Room.

The great wind seemed to play upon Chadlands like a harp. It roared
and reverberated, now stilled a moment for another leap, now died away
against the house, yet still sounded with a steady shout in the neighbor
trees. At the casements it tugged and rattled; against them it flung
the rain fiercely. Every bay and passage of the interior uttered its own
voice, and overh