self "_Bon Dieu!_"

She felt sick. She wished to sleep. But she could not sleep yet. She
must eat and restore her strength. And she had letters to write; a
letter to Mrs. Forrester, a letter to Frau Lippheim, and a note to
Tallie. It was as if she had thrown her shuttle across a vast loom that,
drawing her after the thread she held, enmeshed her now with all the
others in its moving web. She no longer wove; she was being woven into
the pattern. Even if she would she could not extricate herself.

The thought of this overmastering destiny sustained and fortified her.
She went on down the stairs and into the little sitting-room.

CHAPTER XLIV

The days that passed after her arrival at the inn were to live in Madame
von Marwitz's memory as a glare of intolerable anxiety, obliterating all
details in its heat and urgency. She might, during the hours when she
knelt supplicating beside Karen's bed, have been imaged as a furnace and
Karen as a corpse lying in it, strangely unconsumed, passive and
unresponsive. There was no cruelty in Karen's coldness, no unkindness
even. Pity and comprehension were there; but they were rocks against
which Madame von Marwitz dashed herself in vain.

When she would slip from her kneeling position and lie grovelling and
groaning on the ground, Karen sometimes would say: "Please get up.
Please don't cry," in a tone of distress. But when the question,
repeated in every key, came: "Karen, will you not love me again?"
Karen's answer was a helpless silence.

Schooling the fury of her eagerness, and in another mood, Madame von
Marwitz, after long cogitations in the little sitting-room, would mount
to point out to Karen that to persist in her refusal to marry Franz,
when she was freed, would be to disgrace herself and him, and to this
Karen monotonously and immovably would reply that she would not marry
Franz.

Madame von Marwitz had not been able to keep from her beyond the evening
of the first day that Franz had gone. "To Germany, my Karen, where he
will wait for you." Karen's eyes had dwelt widely, but dully, on her
when she made this announcement and she had spoken no word; nor had she
made any comment on Madame von Marwitz's further explanations.

"He felt it right to go at once, now that I had come, and bring no
further scandal on your head. He would not have you waked to say
good-bye."

Karen lay silent, but the impassive bitterness deepened on her lips.
When Franz's first letter