Chapter 23

It was not utterly dark in the room, though Robin, after passing
her hands carefully over the walls, had found no electric buttons
within reach nor any signs of candles or matches elsewhere. The
night sky was clear and brilliant with many stars, and this gave
her an unshadowed and lighted space to look at. She went to the
window and sat down on the floor, huddled against the wall with
her hands clasped round her knees, looking up. She did this in the
effort to hold in check a rising tide of frenzy which threatened
her. 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. She became a young Fury, to whom a mad fight
with monstrous death was nothing. She told herself that she was
strong for a girl--that she could tear with her nails, she could
clench her teeth in a flesh, she could shriek, she could battle
like a young madwoman so that they would be FORCED to kill her. This
was one of the images which rose op before her again yet again,
A hideous-hideous thing, which would not remain away.

She had not had any food since the afternoon cap of tea and she
began to feel the need of it. If she became faint-! She lifted
her face desperately as she said it, and saw the immense blue
darkness, powdered with millions of stars and