When the light faded she moved to the bed and began to brush out her hair.  The sun had set, and she had drawn the dark, narrow blinds; down their edges showed the gleam of the outside world steeped in a cold blue-green light like the depths of the sea, and the faded curtains wavered slowly in the breeze like long swaying strips of seaweed.  Blanche, swathed in a pale wrapper and sitting on the bed whose whiteness was dimmed by the greenish dusk, was suggestive of a stage mermaid combing her locks upon a property sandbank.

She lit her lamp, and at once the gleam without turned a deep, soft blue.  She knotted her pale hair on the nape of her neck, and, chin up, hands on hips, stared critically at herself in the glass, and, as she looked her lips parted a little in pleasure.  Snatching up the hand-glass, she poised from one foot to the other, craning her neck to see herself from every possible point of view.

“Yes,” she decided, “I’ll go.  And then—­a new life.  Miss Blanche Nevill will vanish into thin air, and hurrah! for Blanche Grey, who will be—­herself.”

She slept, thinking of Ishmael and herself, as he of her, while in a dim room, lying perforce motionless in her hot bed, a girl thought, with the brain left clear amidst all her failing senses, of two boys who stood as symbols of a happy time when life was unclouded by even the least conscious hints of the creeping Thing.  She felt, in her thick confusion of tongue and ear and eye, more uncouth than she was, and not for any good life could still hold for her would she have had either see her—­Killigrew because he had been fond of her, Ishmael because she had been fond of him.

A week later Ishmael arrived back at Cloom.  As he walked along on the first evening after his return the feel of the country smote him as never before.  Ecstasy welled in him, clear and living; the strong, pure air made him want to shout with joy.  And more than the sight of the swelling land, more than the feel of the springy turf beneath his feet, or the wind on his eyelids, it was the smell of the country that woke in him this ecstasy.  Sweet as the breath of cows came its mingled fragrance of grass and earth and of the fine dust on the roadway, of the bitter-sweet tang of the bracken and faint aftermath of hay; the breath at his nostrils was drunken with sweet odour.  He had come back to face Archelaus, it was true, but he came back a man.

It was a good world, and he would make his corner of it still better....  How splendid it was to be alive and tingling with the knowledge that everything lay before one!  Pain and sorrow were only words that fell away into nothingness before the joy of merely living....

So he felt as, late that night, he leant upon his window sill and stared out at the darkness that was the background for his imagings of what was to come.  Upon his thoughts there broke the chattering scream of a rabbit caught by a stoat, tearing the velvet tissues of the night’s silence.  On and on it kept, always on one high note, with a horrible persistence.  Ishmael listened, sorry that even a rabbit should suffer on this night of nights, and was glad when the screaming wavered and died into a merciful stillness.  As he dropped asleep the sardonic laughing bark of a full-fed fox came echoing from the earn.