At the front gate of Pereford the following morning, Horton collected the newspaper and brought it into the sun room where Thorn and Katherine were having breakfast. As he left, Horton noticed that Mrs. Thorn's face was still drawn and etched with tension. She had looked this way for weeks now, and he suspected it had something to do with her regular forays into London to spend time with her doctor. He had at first assumed that the appointments he brought her to were for a physical ailment, but then he saw on the directory in the building's lobby that her Dr. Greer was a psychiatrist. Horton himself had never felt the need for a psychiatrist, nor did he know anyone who did, and he harbored a feeling that they only served to drive people crazy. When one read in the newspapers of people committing atrocities it was often accompanied by the information that they had been seeing a psychiatrist; the cause and effect was clearly plain. Now, as he observed Mrs. Thorn, his theory on psychiatry was being borne out. No matter how cheerful she appeared on the drive into town, she was silent and withdrawn on the way back home.

Since the visits began, her mood had continually darkened, and now she was clearly under a strain. Her relationship with the household staff were limited to terse commands, and her relationship with her child had been all but severed. The unhappy part was that the child himself had begun to want her. The period of weeks she had spent trying to regain his affections had had an effect; but now, as Damien looked about for her, she was nowhere to be found.

For Katherine herself, the therapy had indeed been troubling, for she had scratched the surface of her fears, and found beneath it a bottomless pit of anxiety and despair. The life she led was fraught with confusion, and she felt she no longer knew who she was. She remembered who she used to be and what she once wanted, but that was all gone now, and she could envision no future. The simplest things filled her with fear: the phone ringing, the oven timer going off, the teapot whistling as though demanding to be attended to. She was coming to the point where she simply could not cope, and the act of getting through each day required continual courage.

This day took more courage than most, for she had discovered something that demanded action. It required the kind of confrontation with her husband that she feared, and adding to her anxiety was the child. He had made it a habit of hanging close to her in the morning, trying to attract her attention: today he was noisily riding a wheeled car around the parquet floor in the sun room, bumping insistently into her chair and screaming like a train engine as he played.

"Mrs. Baylock?!!" Katherine called.