Not once but many times—­since the transformation was persistently recurrent—­the girl turned her face to the wall to gain relief from the sight of it and the demand it so fearfully embodied, pressing her dry lips together lest any word should escape them.  For the whole matter, as she understood it was secret, sacred too as it was agonizing.  No one must guess what lay at the root of her present suffering—­not even comfortable devoted Mary, nor that invaluable lifebelt, Dr. McCabe.  She held the honour of both those conflicting interchangeable personalities in her hands; and, whether she were strong enough to adjust their differences or not, she must in no wise betray either of them.  The latent motherhood in her cried out to protect and to shield them both, to spare them both.  For in this stage of the affair, while the hallucinations of deadly fever—­in a sense mercifully—­confused her, its grosser aspects did not present themselves to her mind.  She wandered through mazes, painful enough to tread; but far removed from the ugliness of vulgar scandal.  That her sacred secret, for instance, might be no more than a secret de Polichinelle suspected by many, did not, so far, occur to her.

Believing it to be her exclusive property, therefore, she, inspired by tender cunning, strove manfully to keep it so.  To that end she made play with the purely physical miseries of her indisposition.—­With shivering fits and scorching flushes, cold aching limbs and burning, aching head.  With the manifold distractions of errant blood which, leaving her heart empty as a turned-down glass, drummed in her ears and throbbed behind her eyeballs.  These discomforts were severely real enough, in all conscience, to excuse her for being self-occupied and a trifle selfish; to justify a blank refusal to receive Theresa Bilson, or attempt to retail and discuss the events of yesterday.  All she craved was quiet, to be left alone, to lie silent in the quiet light of the covered grey day.

In the earlier hours of it, silver rain showers travelled across the sea to spend themselves, tearfully, against the panes of her bedroom windows.  But towards evening the cloud lifted, revealing a watery sunset, spread in timid reds and yellows behind Stone Horse Head and the curving coast-line beyond, away to Stourmouth and Barryport.  The faint tentative colours struck in long glinting shafts between the trunks and branches of the stone pines and Scotch firs in the so-called Wilderness—­a strip of uncultivated land within the confines of the grounds dividing the gardens from the open Warren to the West—­and gleamed in at the windows, faintly dyeing the dimity hangings and embroidered linen counterpane of Damaris’ bed.

Throughout the afternoon she had been less restless.  So that Mary Fisher, judging her to be fairly asleep, some five minutes earlier had folded her needlework together, and, leaving the chair where she sat sewing, went softly from the room.