she had seen that he could be fierce enough on provocation; therefore,
she argued, he had some obscure ground of offence against her.

Miss Quincey passed a sleepless night reasoning about the reason, a
palpitating never-ending night, without a doze or a dream in it or so
much as the winking of an eyelid. She reasoned about it for a week
between the classes, and in her spare time (when she had any) in the
evening (thus running into debt to _Sordello_ again). At the end of the
week Miss Quincey's mind seemed to have become remarkably lucid; every
thought in it ground to excessive subtlety in the mill of her logic. She
saw it all clearly. There had been some misunderstanding, some terrible
mistake. She had forfeited his friendship through a blunder nameless but
irrevocable. Once or twice she wondered if Mrs. Moon could be at the
bottom of it--or Martha. Had her aunt carried out her dreadful threat of
giving him a hint to send in his account? And had the hint implied that
for the future all accounts with him were closed? Had he called on Mrs.
Moon and been received with crushing hostility? Or had Martha permitted
herself to say that she, Miss Quincey, was out when perhaps he knew for a
positive fact that she was in? But she soon dismissed these conjectures
as inadequate and fell back on her original hypothesis.

And all the time the Old Lady's eyes, and her voice too, were sharper
than ever; from the corner where she dreamed she watched Miss Quincey
incessantly between the dreams. At times the Old Lady was shaken with
terrible and mysterious mirth. Bastian Cautley began to figure
fantastically in her conversation. Her ideas travelled by slow trains of
association that started from nowhere but always arrived at Bastian
Cautley as a terminus. If Juliana had a headache Mrs. Moon supposed that
she wanted that young man to be dancing attendance on her again; if
Juliana sighed she declared that Dr. Cautley was a faithless swain who