Some mysterious phenomenon on the window-blind at her right hand attracted her attention, and she looked round, half startled.  It was the dawn, furtive and inexorable.  She had watched dawns, and she had watched them in that very bedroom.  Only on the previous morning the dawn had met her smarting and wakeful eyes, and she had imagined that no dawn could be more profoundly sad!...  And a little earlier still she had been desolating herself for hours because Louis was going to be careless about his investments, because he was unreliable and she would have to watch ceaselessly over his folly.  She had imagined then that no greater catastrophe could overtake her than some material result of his folly!...  What a trivial apprehension!  What a child she had been!

In the excitement and alarm of his accident she had honestly forgotten her suspicions of him.  That disconcerted her.

She rose from the chair, stiff.  The stove, with its steady faint roar of imperfectly consumed gas, had thoroughly heated the room.  In careful silence she put the tea-things together.  Then she ventured to glance at Louis.  He was asleep.  He had been restlessly asleep for a long time.  She eyed him bitterly in his bandages.  Only last night she had been tormented by that fear that his face might be marked for life.  Again the trivial!  What did it matter whether his face was marked for life or not?...

It did not occur to her to attempt to realize how intense must have been the spiritual tribulation which had forced him to confess.  She knew that he was not dying, that he was in no danger whatever, and she was perfectly indifferent to the genuineness of his own conviction that he was dying.  She simply thought:  “He had to go through all that.  If he fancied he was dying, can I help it?” ...  Then she looked at her own empty bed.  He reposed; he slept.  But she did not repose nor sleep.

She drew aside one of the blinds, and as she did so she could feel the steady slight current of cold air entering the room from the window open at the top.  The street seemed to be full of daylight.  The dawn had been proceeding in its vast secrecy and was now accomplished.  She drew up the blind slowly, and then the gas-flame over the dressing-table seemed so pale and futile that she extinguished it, from a sort of pity.  In silence she pulled out the iron bolts in the window-sash that had been Mrs. Maldon’s device for preventing burglars from opening further a window already open a little, thus combining security with good hygiene.  Louis had laughed at these bolts, but Mrs. Maldon had so instilled their use into both Rachel and Mrs. Tams that to insert them at night was part of the unchangeable routine of the house.  Rachel gently pushed up the lower sash and looked forth.