eep again after this agitating
surprise. She lay listening to the clock, wondering what had led to this
new outrage of Dempster's, praying for the poor thing at her side, and
pitying the mother who would have to hear it all tomorrow.

Chapter 16

Janet lay still, as she had promised; but the tea, which had warmed her
and given her a sense of greater bodily ease, had only heightened the
previous excitement of her brain. Her ideas had a new vividness, which
made her feel as if she had only seen life through a dim haze before; her
thoughts, instead of springing from the action of her own mind, were
external existences, that thrust themselves imperiously upon her like
haunting visions. The future took shape after shape of misery before her,
always ending in her being dragged back again to her old life of terror,
and stupor, and fevered despair. Her husband had so long overshadowed her
life that her imagination could not keep hold of a condition in which
that great dread was absent; and even his absence--what was it? only a
dreary vacant flat, where there was nothing to strive after, nothing to
long for.

At last, the light of morning quenched the rushlight, and Janet's
thoughts became more and more fragmentary and confused. She was every
moment slipping off the level on which she lay thinking, down, down into
some depth from which she tried to rise again with a start. Slumber was
stealing over her weary brain: that uneasy slumber which is only better
than wretched waking, because the life we seemed to live in it determines
no wretched future, because the things we do and suffer in it are but
hateful shadows, and leave no impress that petrifies into an irrevocable
past.

She had scarcely been asleep an hour when her movements became more
violent, her mutterings more frequent and agitated, till at last she
started up with a smothered cry, and looked wildly round her, shaking
with terror.

'Don't be frightened, dear Mrs. Dempster,' said Mrs. Pettifer, who was up
and dressing, 'you are with me, your old friend, Mrs. Pettifer. Nothing
will harm you.'

Janet sank back again on her pillow, still trembling. After lying silent
a little while, she said, 'It was a horrible dream. Dear Mrs. Pettifer,
don't let any one know I am here. Keep it a secret. If he finds out, he
will come and drag me back again.'

'No, my dear, depend on me. I've just thought I shall send the servant
home on a holiday--I've promised her a good