finished dusk came down upon the garden. The days were shortening fast, and when it was cloudy as it now was it was dark at five. The atmosphere was heavy, threatening rain.
Valerie tried to settle down to read till dinner. She did not like to play the piano lest Dane be out in his cot asleep and be wakened by it. But she could not sit still. She was desperately restless. She went out to walk on the drive. For the twentieth time she told herself this way of living could not go on. When Dane was well again she would talk it out with him. It made her feel like an alien in the house. She could not stand it any longer. She told herself she would rather see him drunk, unshaved, sick, if it had to be that kind of thing, than go on with this disrupting isolation. She would enter into the fight with him, make him win.
Where was he now, she wondered. She sneaked round in the shrubs to his side of the house with a strange feeling that she had no business to spy upon him. The canvas blinds on the sleeping end of his verandah were down, and she could see nothing there, and the blinds of his den were down also, but the room was lit within. She stood hidden looking from one French door to the other, looking for what she knew not. But she could not get it out of her head that something tragic beyond her imagining was going on in that room. It was as if she could see the shadows of battling figures posed against the blinds.
She grew frantic thinking of it. Inaction was the one unendurable thing to a person of her disposition. A clod might have stood it, but not a person of her imagination.
She stole back to the front verandah and sat down. The glow from the study fire streamed out through the window and cast distorted streaks of light up and down the trunks of trees. She turned her chair to look into
