peered into hers; faces that
she had forgotten. She thrust them from her into the darkness and they
came again. Each bore the same likeness to his fellow; each had the same
looks, the same gestures that defied her to forget. She fell asleep; and
the dreams, the treacherous, perpetually remembering, delivered her into
their hands.

She waked at dawn, with memory quickened by her dreams. She heard voices
now, all the voices that had accused her. Her mother's voice spoke
first, and it was very sad. It said, "I am sending you away, Kitty,
because of the children." Then her father's voice, very stern, "No, I
will not have you back. You must stay where you are for your little
sisters' sake." And her mother's voice again--afterward--sad and stern,
too, this time, "As you made your bed, Kitty, you must lie. We can't
take you back."

And there was a third voice. It said very softly, "You can't have it
both ways." It cried out aloud in a fury, "I've always known it. You
can't hide it. You're full of it." And yet another voice, deep and hard,
"You can't _not_ tell him. It's a shame Kitty; it's an awful shame."

She could not sleep again for listening to them.

CHAPTER XVIII

It was morning. She dragged herself up and tried to dress. But her hands
shook and her head ached violently. She stretched herself half-dressed
upon her bed and lay there helpless, surrendered to the bodily pain that
delivered her mercifully from the anguish of her mind.

She saw no one, not even Jane Lucy.

Outside, in the passage, and in the inner room she heard the footsteps
of the children and their little shrill voices; each sound accentuated
the stabbing pulse of pain. It was impossible to darken the room, and
the insufferable sunlight poured in unchecked through the thin yellow
blinds and plagued her brain, till the nerves of vision throbbed, beat
for beat, with the nerves of torment. At noon she had only one sensation
of brilliant surging pain.

She dozed and her headache lifted. When she woke her body was weak as if
it had had a fever, but her mind closed on reality with the impact of a
force delayed.

There was a thing not yet quite real to her, a thing that seemed to
belong to the region of bodily pain, to be born there as a bad dream
might be born; a thing that had been there last night among other
things, that, as she stared at it, became more prominent, more poignant
than they. And yet, though its air was so beckoning and so f