sky. Presently her eyes dropped to the level of a distant water-line,
and she saw the river and the trees that fringed its distant bank, and
the swiftly moving boats on its surface.

She was better. She knew all that this meant, how much and how little.
For an interval, long or short, as it should happen to be, she was
again a rational human being. She abruptly swerved around from the
window and swept the room with her eyes, recognizing it as the one she
was occupying before she "went under," as she put it to herself, and
trying, from association with the familiar objects around her, to form
some idea of the length of this attack.

At the beginning of her breakdown the intervals between intelligent
consciousness and insanity had been long. She was herself, or was able
to keep herself fairly in hand, the greater part of the time, and
chaos, when it came, lasted only for a few days or weeks. Recently
this condition had been reversed. She had lost knowledge of time, but
she felt that centuries must have passed since those last flying,
blessed hours when she knew herself at least for what she was. She
grasped now at her returning reason, with a desperate, shuddering
little moan, which she quickly stifled. Some one must be near, she
remembered, on guard: her nurse, or a hotel maid if the nurse was
taking one of her infrequent outings. Whoever was in charge of her
must be in the next room, for the door was open between the two. The
nurse would welcome her return, the patient reflected. It was her
habit--a singularly pathetic habit, the nurse had found it--to refer
always to her attacks as "absences," and to temporary recovery as
"returns."

She moved toward the open door and then stopped, feeling suddenly that