en I feel like it, without calling out the
fire-brigade? You'll pamper me to death and heaven knows I don't need
it."

"You won't let me telephone for Doctor Southall?"

"Certainly not!"

"And you are _sure_ it was nothing but the roses?"

"Why, what else should it be?" said her mother almost peevishly. "I must
really have the arbors thinned out. On heavy nights it's positively
overpowering. Go along now, and we'll talk about it to-morrow. I can
ring if I want anything."

In her own room Shirley undressed thoughtfully. There was between her
and her mother a fine tenuous bond of sympathy and feeling as rare,
perhaps, as it was lovely. She could not remember when the other had not
been a semi-invalid, and her earliest childhood recollections were
punctuated with the tap of the little cane. To-night's sudden
indisposition had shocked and disturbed her; to faint at a rush of
perfume seemed to suggest a growing weakness that was alarming.
To-morrow, she told herself, she would send Ranston with a wagon-load of
the roses to the hospital at Charlottesville.

She slipped on a pink shell-shaded dressing-gown of slinky silk with a
riot of azaleas scattered in the weave, and then, dragging a chair
before the open window, drew aside the light curtain and began to brush
her hair. She parted the lustrous mass with long sweeps of her white
arm, forward first over one shoulder, then over the other. The silver
brush smoothed the lighter ashen ripples that netted and fretted into a
fine amber lace, till they lay, a rich warm mahogany like red earth. The
coppery whorls eddied and merged themselves, showing under-glints of
russet and dun-gold, curling and clasping in flame-tinted furrows like a
living field of gold under a silver harrow. Outside the window the
stars lay on the lapis-lazuli sky like white flower-petals on still deep
water, and in the pasture across the hedges she could see the form of
Selim, her chestnut hunter, standing ghostly, like an equine sentinel.

When that shimmering glory lay in two thick braids against her
shoulders, Shirley rose with a sigh and went to her writing-desk, where
lay her diary. But she was in no mood to write, and she turned from it,
frowning a little, with the reflection that she had not written in it
since the night of the cape jessamines.

All at once her gaze fell upon the floor, and she shrank backward from a
twisting thread-like thing whose bright saffron-yellow glowed sharply
agains