The storm had broken, the flood had come. The storm was over, but the
flood swept far and wide.




CHAPTER XXXVII

THE FLYING SHUTTLE

Hour after hour of sleeplessness. The silver-tongued clock remorselessly
tinkled the quarters, and Hylda lay and waited for them with a hopeless
strained attention. In vain she tried devices to produce that monotony
of thought which sometimes brings sleep. Again and again, as she felt
that sleep was coming at last, the thought of the letter she had found
flashed through her mind with words of fire, and it seemed as if there
had been poured through every vein a subtle irritant. Just such a
surging, thrilling flood she had felt in the surgeon's chair when she was
a girl and an anesthetic had been given. But this wave of sensation led
to no oblivion, no last soothing intoxication. Its current beat against
her heart until she could have cried out from the mere physical pain, the
clamping grip of her trouble. She withered and grew cold under the
torture of it all--the ruthless spoliation of everything which made life
worth while or the past endurable.

About an hour after she had gone to bed she heard Eglington's step. It
paused at her door. She trembled with apprehension lest he should enter.
It was many a day since he had done so, but also she had not heard his
step pause at her door for many a day. She could not bear to face it all
now; she must have time to think, to plan her course--the last course of