Joanna slipped out of bed. She could smell the wallflowers on the dressing-table. The room was not quite dark, but of a negative grey dimness filled with triangular shadows. As she drooped, and sank, and came limply to the floor like a heap of grain that is softly flung down, she thought involuntarily of a field in which the meek sheaves are bowed together. She herself had fallen into something of the posture of an Oriental at prayer. And as she had fallen, so she remained a long while at rest. Her lax thighs ached violently, and her loins were wrung with a new pain as if some poison had suddenly revealed its course. But gradually the ache grew less and less; and when it was gone, instinctively as a woodland creature turns in its sleep, she let herself roll with a gentle heavy movement on to her back. Her limbs, all slack, went sliding and quivering their length upon the grey floor. Soon every inch of her lay there released. Not till that moment did she know how tightly strung she had been for the last forty hours and more.

Then how steadily and how strangely the deathliness of fatigue went rippling along her arms, along her legs, and away! Here at least Aunt Perdy had been right. One thought wrongly of the body as of something single and upright. Truly it was no more than a handful of various weights strung loosely on a string.

Joanna knew that she was safe now from what had threatened her. Her body, still bereft, was safe. Her defeated brain was laved by the clear waves of nothingness. She lay and lay till time, for her, was not. Slowly her breathing altered. It grew deeper, milder, more regular, and at last in the sure knowledge of sleep she returned to her bed.

It was now that there sounded in her soothed ear a small, sweet forgotten voice of childhood. At Duntarvie, long ago, her bed had stood within hearing of the house cistern. Here in the same room with her, by a curious chance was the water tank of the hotel. It was hidden in a cupboard, and in the daytime she had only dully recognized a familiar presence by certain muffled thrummings and spoutings and sudden gushings. Through the night as yet she had marked no sound at all.

But now in this secret hour before dawn, when the rest of the world was asleep, and Joanna was waiting in quietness till sleep should come to her, the water began to speak. It started unaccountably out of the silence with exquisite precision.