She reached home, as she had thought, before ten o’clock, her unexpected arrival occasioning the usual flurry of exclamation and question not to be suppressed even by the most self-contained family with a fixed desire to let its members alone, and a firm tradition of not interfering in their private affairs.  Judith had come home before her father and now looked up from her game of checkers with wondering eyes.  Sylvia explained that she was not sick, and that nothing had happened to break up or disturb the house-party.  “I just felt like coming home, that’s all!” she said irritably, touched on the raw by the friendly loving eyes and voices about her.  She was glad at least that her father was not at home.  That was one less to look at her.

“Well, get along to bed with you!” said her mother, in answer to her impatient explanation.  “And, you children—­keep still!  Don’t bother her!”

Sylvia crept upstairs into the whiteness of her own slant-ceilinged room, and without lighting a lamp sat down on the bed.  Her knees shook under her.  She made no move to take off her furs or hat.  She felt no emotion, only a leaden fatigue and lameness as though she had been beaten.  Her mother, coming in five minutes later with a lighted lamp and a cup of hot chocolate, made no comment at finding her still sitting, fully dressed in the dark.  She set the lamp down, and with swift deftness slipped out hatpins, unhooked furs, unbuttoned and unlaced and loosened, until Sylvia woke from her lethargy and quickly completed the process, slipping on her nightgown and getting into bed.  Not a word had been exchanged.  Mrs. Marshall brought the cup of hot chocolate and Sylvia drank it as though she were a little girl again.  Her mother kissed her good-night, drew the blankets a little more snugly over her, opened two windows wide, took away the lamp, and shut the door.

Sylvia, warmed and fed by the chocolate, lay stretched at full length in the bed, breathing in the fresh air which rushed across her face from the windows, feeling herself in a white beatitude of safety and peace.  Especially did she feel grateful to her mother.  “Isn’t Mother great!” she said to herself.  Everything that had passed seemed like a confusing dream to her, so dreadful, so terrifying that she was amazed to feel herself, in spite of it, overcome with drowsiness.  Now the roles were reversed.  It was her brain that was active, racing and shuddering from one frightening mental picture to another, while her body, young, sound, healthful, fell deeper and deeper into torpor, dragging the quivering mind down to healing depths of oblivion.  The cold, pure air blew so strongly in her face that she closed her eyes.  When she opened them again the sun was shining.

She started up nervously, still under the influence of a vivid dream—­strange....  Then as she blinked and rubbed her eyes she saw her mother standing by the bed, with a pale, composed face.