That night she lay awake and listened to it.

It was going diddledy, diddledy, like the triplets in a Beethoven sonata
(only that it had no idea of time); then it suddenly left off till she
put her hand over it, when it gave a terrifying succession of runaway
knocks. Then it pretended that it was going to stop altogether, and Miss
Quincey implicitly believed it and prepared to die. Then its tactics
changed; it seemed to have shifted its habitation; to be rising and
rising, to be entangled with her collar-bone and struggling in her
throat. Then it sank suddenly and lay like a lump of lead, dragging her
down through the mattress, and through the bedstead, and through the
floor, down to the bottom of all things. Miss Quincey did not mind much;
she had been so unhappy. And then it gave an alarming double-knock at her
ribs, and Miss Quincey came to life again as unhappy as ever.

And of what it all meant Miss Quincey had no more idea than the man in
the moon, though even the Mad Hatter could have told her. Her heart went
through the same performance a second and a third night, and Miss Quincey
said to herself that if it happened again she would have to send for Dr.
Cautley. Nothing would have induced her to see him for a mere trifle, but
pride was one thing and prudence was another.

It did happen again, and she sent.

She may have hoped that he would discover something wrong, being dimly
conscious that her chance lay there, that suffering constituted the
incontestable claim on his sympathy; most distinctly she felt the desire
(monstrous of course in a woman of no account) to wear the aureole of
pain for its own sake; to walk for a little while in the glory and
glamour of death. She did not want or mean to give any trouble, to be a
source of expense; she had saved a little money for the supreme luxury.
But she had hardly entertained the idea for a moment when she dismissed
it as selfish. It was her duty to live, for the sake of St. Sidwell's and
of Mrs. Moon; and she was only calling Dr. Cautley in to help her to do
it. But through it all the feeling uppermost was joy in the certainty
that she would see him on an honourable pretext, and would be able to set
right that terrible misunderstanding.

She hardly expected him till late in the day; so she was a little
startled, when she came in after morning school, to find Mrs. Moon
waiting for her at the stairs, quivering with indignation that could have
but one cause.

He h