Perhaps, if she could fix her eyes on the vault full of
stars, she could keep herself from going out of her mind. Though,
perhaps, it would be better if she DID go out of her mind, she
found herself thinking a few seconds later.
After her first entire acceptance of the hideous thing which
had happened to her, she had passed through nerve breaking phases
of terror-stricken imaginings. The old story of the drowning man
across whose brain rush all the images of life, came back to her.
She did not know where or when or how she had ever heard or read
of the ghastly incidents which came trooping up to her and staring
at her with dead or mad eyes and awful faces. Perhaps they were
old nightmares-perhaps a kind of delirium had seized her. She tried
to stop their coming by saying over and over again the prayers
Dowie had taught her when she was a child. And then she thought,
with a sob which choked her, that perhaps they were only prayers
for a safe little creature kneeling by a white bed-and did not
apply to a girl locked up in a top room, which nobody knew about.
Only when she thought of Mademoiselle Valle and Dowie looking for
her--with all London spread out before their helplessness--did
she cry. After that, tears seemed impossible. The images trooped
by too close to her. The passion hidden within her being--which
had broken out when she tore the earth under the shrubbery, and
which, with torture staring her in the face, had leaped in the
child's soul and body and made her defy Andrews with shrieks--leaped
up within her now.
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