“Serve her right,” she cried.  “I shouldn’t care.  I hate her!  I hate her!  I told you once I couldn’t, but I do.  She’s the biggest fool that ever lived.  She knew nothing of what I felt.  I believe she thought I would rejoice with her.  I didn’t know whether I should shriek in her face or scream out laughing.  Her eyes were as big as saucers, and she looked at me as if she felt like the Virgin Mary after the Annunciation.  Oh! the stupid, inhuman fool!”

Her words rushed forth faster and faster, she caught her breath with gasps, and her voice grew more shrill at every sentence.  Osborn shook her again.

“Keep quiet,” he ordered her.  “You are going into hysterics, and it won’t do.  Get hold of yourself.”

“Go for Ameerah,” she gasped, “or I’m afraid I can’t.  She knows what to do.”

He went for Ameerah, and the silently gliding creature came bringing her remedies with her.  She looked at her mistress with stealthily questioning but affectionate eyes, and sat down on the floor rubbing her hands and feet in a sort of soothing massage.  Osborn went out of the room, and the two women were left together.  Ameerah knew many ways of calming her mistress’s nerves, and perhaps one of the chief ones was to lead her by subtle powers to talk out her rages and anxieties.  Hester never knew that she was revealing herself and her moods until after her interviews with the Ayah were over.  Sometimes an hour or so had passed before she began to realise that she had let out things which she had meant to keep secret.  It was never Ameerah who talked, and Hester was never conscious that she talked very much herself.  But afterwards she saw that the few sentences she had uttered were such as would satisfy curiosity if the Ayah felt it.  Also she was not, on the whole, at all sure that the woman felt it.  She showed no outward sign of any interest other than the interest of a deep affection.  She loved her young mistress to-day as passionately as she had loved her as a child when she had held her in her bosom as if she had been her own.  By the time Emily Walderhurst had reached Palstrey, Ameerah knew many things.  She understood that her mistress was as one who, standing upon the brink of a precipice, was being slowly but surely pushed over its edge—­pushed, pushed by Fate.  This was the thing imaged in her mind when she shut herself up in her room and stood alone in the midst of the chamber clenching her dark hands high above her white veiled head, and uttering curses which were spells, and spells which were curses.

Emily was glad that she had elected to be alone as much as possible, and had not invited people to come and stay with her.  She had not invited people, in honest truth, because she felt shy of the responsibility of entertainment while Walderhurst was not with her.  It would have been proper to invite his friends, and his friends were all people she was too much in awe of, and too desirous to please to be able to enjoy frankly as society.  She had told herself that when she had been married a few years she would be braver.