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NLP Research Group 9

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

tears

How many times the word 'tears' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

get

How many times the word 'get' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

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what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

malicious

How many times the word 'malicious' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

rainwater

How many times the word 'rainwater' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

mirror-

How many times the word 'mirror-' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

seat

How many times the word 'seat' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

discovered

How many times the word 'discovered' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

speed

How many times the word 'speed' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

jumped

How many times the word 'jumped' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

needed

How many times the word 'needed' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

happened

How many times the word 'happened' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

supposed

How many times the word 'supposed' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

robespierre

How many times the word 'robespierre' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

instinct

How many times the word 'instinct' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

stops

How many times the word 'stops' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

vehicle

How many times the word 'vehicle' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

desperately

How many times the word 'desperately' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

arrives

How many times the word 'arrives' appears in the text?

what I'm saying? Ben stops- BEN You have to trust me Amy, I'm not completely crazy... These mirrors are dangerous. At first, I thought it was only the ones at the store, but now I know they can get you anywhere. They got Angela... I promise I'll leave the house once I've taken them all down. AMY Do you realize what you're saying, Ben? What is wrong with you? I know that what you're going through isn't easy. Angela was a part of our lives too, but you have no right to do this to us... Ever since your obsession with these damn mirrors the kids are scared to death. Your son has nightmares. He's scared Ben... Your behavior is starting to rub off on him. He's only 5 years old... And I have to protect him. Ben can see that she is very upset about the situation. He sets down the paint bucket on the floor- BEN Come Amy, come with me, I want to show you something. He leads her back down, through the first floor, and out on the front steps of the house- 81 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - CONTINUITY 81 BEN Look, you'll see... Ben pulls his Magnum out of his belt and points the gun at one of the mirrors he has dragged outside. Amy steps back, terrified- (CONTINUED) 63. 81 CONTINUED: 81 AMY What are you doing with that gun... Put it down, BEN... PUT IT DOWN RIGHT NOW! Without a moment's hesitation, Ben opens fire. The mirror shatters to pieces- AMY (CONT'D) ARE YOU CRAZY BEN? HAVE YOU GONE COMPLETELY MAD? Ben smiles, all excited- BEN Wait, look, you'll see... Through the front window, Daisy and Michael witness the scene- AMY SEE WHAT, BEN?! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE ?! Ben keeps a piercing gaze as the bullet impacts the mirror, waiting for the magic to do its trick and for the cracks to dissolve again- BUT NOTHING HAPPENS. THE CRACKS REMAIN, IN A SPIDER WEB PATTERN. Behind the front door, Ben notices Michael, watching him, in tears. Without any evidence, Ben is in over his head. BEN But... I swear to you I... I saw...Amy... The neighbors, alerted by the blast of the gun, come out of their houses to find out what has happened. Ben stands alone, looking like a mad man... Amy holds back her tears and tries to stay in control- AMY Get out...now! I don't ever want to see you here again, Ben. And I'll have the lawyers make sure the same goes for the kids. You are insane, Ben, and dangerous... You've got to get help. With gun in hand, Ben walks away, dismayed, as he gradually becomes aware of the situation he has just created. He enters his car and drives off at top speed. 64. 82 EXT/INT. DAY - ROAD - BEN'S CAR 82 Ben drives nervously. He feels guilty about his conduct in front of the children. A thousand thoughts rush through his head, leaving him in an utter state of confusion. He doesn't know what to do nor what to think anymore. Ben reaches for his cell phone and dials Larry's number- BEN Hello, Larry? It's me... I'm going to need your help again- LARRY (O.S.) Come on, Ben... For Christ's sake! What are you doing? BEN Mayflower used to be a hospital before it became a department store. St. John's Hospital. Do you have any idea where all the medical records could have ended up after it closed down? LARRY (O.S.) How am I supposed to know that?! BEN Go to the city hall archives... They must have something considering it was a public hospital. LARRY (O.S.) I've got others things to do. I can't go to City Hall today. I've - BEN Larry, Larry stop it... If I could go myself, I wouldn't be asking you. Go to the City Hall archives, and ask them to look up Esseker among the former patients. Please. LARRY (O.S.) Ben, for god's sake, what are you trying to prove? BEN Please, do it for me. LARRY (O.S.) You know you're a real pain in the ass. (CONTINUED) 65. 82 CONTINUED: 82 BEN Talk to you later. Ben hangs up. He glances back at the rear view mirror and sees ANGELA'S CORPSE, SITTING ON THE BACK SEAT! Startled, he loses control of the vehicle. A truck approaches at full speed in the opposite lane. He barely avoids the collision. Two other cars appear. Ben zigzags in and out, just barely avoiding a fatal crash. He stops along the edge of the road. Ben closes his eyes and rests his head against the steering wheel in an attempt to clear his mind. He looks up into the rear- view mirror again- ANGELA'S REFLECTION IS STILL THERE. Behind her long black hair, she fixes him with a milky gaze. Ben flies into a rage. HE SMASHES THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR WITH HIS BARE FIST, REDUCING IT TO SCRAPS... Ben is alone and lost. BEN (CONT'D) What have I done? I don't understand... What have I done? Insert on what is written on the side rear-view mirror- "OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR" 83 EXT. NIGHT -MANHATTAN STREET - NYPD POLICE STATION 83 Under the pouring rain, the police patrol cars come and go in front of the police station. A bit further away we recognize Ben's Oldsmobile, parked on an adjacent street. Ben is waiting inside. A man approaches, knocks on the car window and enters the vehicle. It's LARRY- The rainwater drips down his raincoat. Under his arm he holds a file of documents, wrapped in a plastic bag. LARRY This ought to make you happy... (handing him the file) Anna Esseker... (CONTINUED) 66. 83 CONTINUED: 83 Ben nervously tears open the plastic wrapping- LARRY (CONT'D) I wasn't quite sure what you needed, so I got all of her medical records. BEN Perfect, Larry. That's perfect. Ben skims through the pages. He cannot believe that he has finally discovered who Esseker is... LARRY Everyone's real edgy up there. You're still a fuckin' murder suspect. People are wondering why I let you out. You have to tell me more. What does the history of the Mayflower have to do with the death of your sister? BEN I don't know exactly. I can't tell you, but some really fucked up things started happening to me when I took the job over there. Nothing makes any sense to me either but I have to follow my instinct. Larry notices the broken rear-view mirror- LARRY What happened? Did you have an accident? Ben is too absorbed in the records. He doesn't answer. BEN Anna Esseker... Where did you find her files? Did you go to City Hall? LARRY No, you were wrong about that, they had nothing. All the medical records from St. John's Hospital are still up there with the unclassified cases. Ben squints at him. LARRY (CONT'D) She was a patient at St. John's in the psych ward run by a Dr. Kane, between March and September 1952. She was only twelve years old when she died... Ben freezes- (CONTINUED) 67. 83 CONTINUED: (2) 83 BEN What? LARRY When the nurses went on their rounds, first thing on the morning of October 6th, they discovered that all the patients had left their rooms during the night and gathered in the main room. All of them were dead, including the girl. Apparently, they had killed one another... A slaughter house... After that they shut down the place. Nobody ever found out what really happened. BEN What about the doctor? Dr. Kane? LARRY He was arrested. They found him dead on the first day of his hearing. He had slit his wrists with a piece of his cell mirror! CUT TO: 84 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS BUILDING- ENTRANCE HALL 84 Ben heads home with the file containing Anna's medical records. He walks through the lobby of his building. 85 OMITTED 85 86 INT. NIGHT - QUEENS APARTMENT 86 Angela's apartment is plunged in total darkness- Ben lays Anna Esseker's file on the coffee table and aims the desk lamp at his "research corner" on the wall. He turns the lamp back at the file and sits down to study it. WHY ARE THE MIRRORS ASKING FOR ANNA IF SHE'S ALREADY DEAD? WHY? IT DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE... On an index card filled in by Anna's parents in September 1952, Ben finds a Pennsylvania home address. Dr. Kane's first diagnosis is irrevocable - "Despite her young age, Anna Esseker suffers from severe schizophrenia, leading to withdrawal from reality, delusional and violent behavior." (CONTINUED) 68. 86 CONTINUED: 86 He shuffles through the first few pages of various administrative documents. His eye lands on several photographs of Anna taken at the time she was admitted to the hospital- She is just a child, yet, six male nurses were needed to restrain and immobilize her in front of the photographer. Her face is hardly discernible as she struggles like a wild animal. A high-pitched sound of cracking glass is heard from behind. Ben turns around- Another loud crack - It comes from one of the covered mirrors in the apartment. Ben rises slowly to his feet and comes closer. He removes the sheet hanging on the frame- A crack has appeared in the upper corner of the mirror. Ben casts his eyes over the reflection. His glance comes to rest on Anna's file laying on the desk- He goes to fetch the photograph of the little girl and presents it to the mirror- KRAAAAACK - the crack in the mirror spreads, as if some kind of pressure were applied on the other side of the mirror as a reaction to the photograph... BEN You're still alive, aren't you? All of a sudden, Ben realizes something. He runs back to the file on the table and goes through the documents again, one by one. He stops on a carbon copy of a hospital release form and checks the date. BEN (CONT'D) You're wrong Larry, you're wrong... His eyes light up- BEN (CONT'D) ...she left the hospital on the 4th. According to the document, Anna left two days before the massacre! CUT TO: 87 INT. - DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 87 The next morning- (CONTINUED) 69. 87 CONTINUED: 87 Through the half-opened door at the end of the hallway, we see Daisy brushing her teeth before going to school. The little girl is humming as she watches herself in the mirror... Amy comes out of her room- AMY Come on, come on... Let's go... Daisy, Michael? She passes in front of the children's room and stops- INSIDE, MICHAEL IS TALKING TO SOMEBODY. Amy listens closely, but she can only hear Michael's voice. On the other side of the door, the little boy bursts out in laughter- 88 INT. DAY - CHILDREN'S ROOM 88 She opens the door and finds her son squatting in front of the mirror, talking to his own reflection. AMY What are you doing Michael? Come on, we're going to be late. The little boy does as his mother says. He gets up and dashes out of the room. Amy's glance freezes in horror. Terrified, she almost loses her balance- MICHAEL'S REFLECTION IS STILL IN THE MIRROR, SITTING IN A SQUATTING POSITION! HE LOOKS AT AMY WITH A BIG SMILE. Amy attempts to speak but can't- The mirror image of her son remains silent. Amy steps closer to the mirror and, in the reflection, behind the boy, she discovers- HER MIRROR IMAGE IS THERE TOO, BEARING THE SAME FORCED GRIN... CUT TO: 89 INT. DAY -QUEENS APARTMENT 89 The phone rings. Ben wakes up in a jolt and picks it up- AMY IS ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE, IN TEARS. BEN Amy ? What's wrong? (CONTINUED) 70. 89 CONTINUED: 89 AMY O.S. ...You have to come over... Right away... BEN What? Amy cannot get the words out. The convulsive sobs overtake her voice. AMY O.S. I'm so scared, Ben... BEN What's happening? AMY O.S. There's something in the house... Something in the mirrors. BEN Where are Daisy and Michael? Are the kids all right? AMY O.S. They're with me... They're right here with me. Come over, please! BEN Get out of the house. I'll be right over... 90 EXT. DAY -QUEENS' STREET 90 Ben runs to his car and throws the Esseker file on the passenger seat. He drives off at full speed and disappears at the far end of the road. CUT TO : 91 EXT/INT. DAY - MAYFLOWER 91 On 38th Street, away from the hustle and bustle of Broadway, the Mayflower facade is unsettling and disturbing. AMIDST THE RUINS OF THE DESERTED DEPARTMENT STORE, THE MIRRORS ARE WAITING PATIENTLY FOR THEIR TIME TO COME... 92 EXT. DAY - NEW JERSEY HOUSE 92 When he arrives, Ben finds his wife waiting in front of the house. The kids are playing in the snow. Ben's car pulls up in the driveway. (CONTINUED) 71. 92 CONTINUED: 92 Amy throws herself into his arms, crying with relief. BEN I'm right here, Amy. I'm here now... Thank god you're alright. Ben comforts her, holding her tightly with all his strength. AMY We can't stay here, we have to leave the house now... We can go to my mother's or to a hotel... BEN Anyplace is gonna have mirrors or windows... Anything you can see your self in is dangerous. We have to make the house safe. The only way is to cover all the reflections. If we keep them in the dark we can avoid them. We need paint, we need tape... CUT TO : 93 INT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE - A MOMENT LATER 93 Ben has brought up some more paint from the basement. With Amy's help he paints over all the mirrors in the house. In the face of this hardship, all the arguments seem far away. We can feel a connection between the two of them. The windowpanes and picture frames have been wrapped securely with newspaper and tape. Every inch of reflective surface in the house, such as the TV- screen and the shiny taps, have been "neutralized" with strips of masking tape... IN NO TIME, THERE IS NOT A SINGLE SURFACE CAPABLE OF REFLECTING LIGHT LEFT IN THE HOUSE. CUT TO : 94 EXT. DAY -NEW JERSEY HOUSE 94 The front door of the house opens. On the landing of the front steps, Ben kisses Daisy goodbye. DAISY When will you be back, Dad? (CONTINUED) 72. 94 CONTINUED: 94 BEN As quickly as I can, sweetheart. I promise. He kisses Michael who hugs him back- MICHAEL I love you, Dad. He strokes Michael gently on the head and goes to his car. Daisy and Michael watch their father leave. Amy walks him to the vehicle- AMY What if you don't find her? Maybe she doesn't live there anymore? Maybe she's really dead. BEN They want her, I'm gonna find her wherever she is. We don't have any other choice. Ben holds her tightly in his arms and plants a tender kiss on her forehead. BEN (CONT'D) I'm sorry about everything I've put you through... I didn't want to... Amy interrupts him. AMY I know. Ben gets into the car. BEN Amy, I want you to stay here with the kids until all this is over. All the mirrors are covered, there's no more danger. I'll come back as soon as I can. Tears well up in Amy's eyes. He takes her hand- BEN (CONT'D) Hey baby, everything's gonna be fine. I love you. She smiles tenderly. Ben drives off. 73. 95 INT. DAY - BEN'S CAR 95 Through the back window, we see Amy in front of the house, growing more and more distant. Anna's medical file lies open on the passenger seat- At the top of the page we can read her old address in Pennsylvania. 96 EXT. DAY - ROAD 96 -Aerial shot- We fly over a lake- the waters are so placid that the forest and outline of the scenery surrounding it reflect off its surface, creating two perfectly symmetrical landscapes. We glide over the treetops, diving deeper into the forest, to follow the main road that zigzags along the slope of the hill. 97 DISSOLVE TO: 97 98 INT. DAY -BEN'S CAR 98 A sign on the edge of the road indicates 67 miles to Pennsylvania. Ben focuses on the road, determined to put an end to what hides behind the mirrors and to rescue his family. 98A OMITTED 98A 99 EXT. DAY - COUNTRY ROAD 99 Ben's car slows down as he reaches a dirt road. On one of the mailboxes standing on the edge of the road he spots the name Esseker- 100 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 100 The wind blows over the land. In the winter season, the muddy fields have little to offer to the few starving crows flying over them. A feeling of desolation and solitude hangs over the deserted landscape. Ben's car has left the asphalt road behind, driving through the countryside down a winding dirt road. (CONTINUED) 74. 100 CONTINUED: 100 An old farmhouse stands at the very end of the path. If it weren't for the parked pick-up truck and the few piglets running wild, one would think that the farmhouse was abandoned. Ben gets out of the car and goes to knock on the door. His shoes sink into the mud. He walks up the steps of the porch and peeks inside the house through the front window. In the dark he discerns the silhouette of a person who is watching TV. He can't help but notice all the mirrors have been covered or turned towards the wall. A big dog barks behind the window. Ben steps back, surprised. The front door opens before Ben has even made his presence known. A young man stares at him in silence. BEN Hello... Is this the Esseker farmhouse? The young man nods. A woman's voice is heard from inside- WOMAN'S VOICE What is it Jimmy? JIMMY I don't know Mom. (to Ben) What can I do for you sir? BEN I am looking for Anna, Anna Esseker. The young man looks at Ben questioningly. Apparently he has never heard the name before. JIMMY (to his mother inside) There's a man who's looking for... (back to Ben) You said Anna? (Ben confirms) Anna Esseker, Mom! Jimmy's mother, in her fifties, an obese woman who has trouble moving around- shows up in the opening of the door - JIMMY'S MOTHER What is it you want with Anna Esseker? She catches him unaware. Ben makes up a false identity- (CONTINUED) 75. 100 CONTINUED: (2) 100 BEN I huh... I am doing some research for a book on the history of St. John's Hospital, in New York... Jimmy's mother stares at him for a moment with a suspicious look- JIMMY'S MOTHER Jimmy, go tell grandpa that there's a man here who'd like to talk to him about his sister. 101 INT. DAY - FARMHOUSE BASEMENT 101 We are in the dark basement, under the farmhouse. The door to the first floor opens, letting the light in. Ben appears next to the silhouette of an old man- ROBERT ESSEKER, 80 years old, Anna's elder brother. Robert walks down the steps, signaling Ben to follow him- ROBERT You know, up to this day, the visions of Anna's fits still haunt me at night. They walk through the basement towards an old wooden door. ROBERT (CONT'D) I helped my father fix up this part of the basement, especially for her- The old man turns the key in the padlock. Slowly, the door swings open, revealing- ROBERT (CONT'D) Her fits were too violent. My mother couldn't take her screams anymore. What's left of a very primitive child's room, SURROUNDED BY DOUBLE WIRE FENCING AND IRON BARS. Rather than a cell, it more resembles a HUMAN-SIZED CAGE, CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE MOST FEROCIOUS BEAST. As he's talking, images flash on screen- painful memories from that time come back to him- Anna being carried to the basement, her innocent eyes full of hate. It's even hard to recognize the face of a little girl. Her howling screams. Her nails digging into her own flesh. Her unnatural strength and the violent thrashing of her arms and legs. (CONTINUED) 76. 101 CONTINUED: 101 ROBERT (CONT'D) We had every priest, doctor, healer, coming from all over the state, one after the other. But no one could help her. Ben comes closer to the iron bars of the cage. He can see Anna's scratch marks next to the bed, giving his imagination a taste of her plight and suffering. ROBERT (CONT'D) Finally, Dr. Kane from New York answered my parents' cry for help. He rejected the idea of demonic possession, said he didn't believe in it. He was convinced that Anna suffered from a rare form of personality disorder. He wanted Anna under his care, at St. John's. My parents were very poor, but he agreed to cover all the hospital costs... In less than five months, Dr. Kane had cured Anna. It was unbelievable. She was her old self again. A real miracle of science. BEN And after the hospital? ROBERT You don't know? She died there with all of Kane's other patients. Ben takes the old release form out of his pocket and shows it to Robert. BEN Anna left the hospital two days before the massacre. Kane changed the records to make her disappear. ROBERT You're not a journalist, are you? What do you want? BEN I want to know. After St. John's, where did she go? Robert stares at Ben, unsure of saying what he's about to reveal to this perfect stranger- ROBERT Anna came back to live with us for a while... (CONTINUED) 77. 101 CONTINUED: (2) 101 BEN For a while? Robert lowers his eyes. BEN (CONT'D) And after? Why did she leave? ROBERT Because... Because strange things started to happen in the house... BEN With Anna? ROBERT No, not with Anna... The old man obviously doesn't want to get into the details. The memories are too painful. BEN With the mirrors? Robert stiffens, eyeing Ben with a dark look- How does he know? BEN (CONT'D) Mr. Esseker, tell me where I can find your sister. It's very important. It's a matter of life and death. Robert hesitates - ROBERT Before he died, Kane sent us a letter asking us to keep Anna away from mirrors and that whatever happens she should be in a place where the mirrors could never find her. BEN Where is she now? ROBERT To protect us, she left the house and joined the monastic orders, where mirrors are forbidden... St. Augustine's monastery, on the road to Midwich. 102 EXT. DAY - ESSEKER FARMHOUSE 102 Ben's car does a one-eighty turn in front of the farmhouse, heading back to the main road. (CONTINUED) 78. 102 CONTINUED: 102 Standing on the porch, with an anxious look on his face, Robert watches him disappear in the distance. He sits down on the steps, and wipes his glasses. The crows fly low in the sky- It's a bad sign. CUT TO : 103 EXT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY 103 The nuns come and go under the arches of the monastic courtyard. A deadly silence prevails over the monastery, where time seems to stand still. All these women have taken vows of poverty, obedience and chastity to serve god. On the other side of the cloister wall, a small winding road zigzags between the pine trees. Ben's car draws nearer. He parks in front of the entrance to the monastery. 104 INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 104 Ben pushes open the heavy front door. The place is dark and silent. He goes to the front desk- Behind a wooden screen he can barely make out the two nuns in charge of admissions. They are the only nuns granted exposure to the outside world. For the rest, physical and visual contact is strictly prohibited. SISTER Yes, how can I help you? BEN Hello Sister. I have come to visit a member of your community... Sister Anna? Her real name is Anna Esseker. SISTER Is she expecting you? BEN No, not really. SISTER Are you a relative? BEN Listen, Sister, I must see her. SISTER If you are not listed, I cannot help you sir. (MORE) (CONTINUED) 79. 104 CONTINUED: 104 SISTER (CONT'D) We have strict regulations concerning visitations, which are exclusively for family members. BEN Please, tell her that I came all the way from New York and that I work with Dr. Kane at St. John's Hospital... SISTER Wait here for a moment. She stands up and escapes through one of the back doors. The other nun behind the screen, observes Ben with curiosity. Time goes by, and Ben grows impatient. 107 INT. DAY - HOUSE NEW JERSEY 107 Inside the house in Jersey, Amy has isolated herself with the kids in the parent's bedroom. She's reading them a bedtime story. Even if all the windows, screens, and TV are covered by newspapers or painting, Amy acts in front of Daisy and Michael as if nothing has happened. In the rest of the house, everything has been meticulously covered, wrapped, painted or reversed. Still, here and there, a barely audible rustle pierces through the silence- In the children's room, the paint covering the mirror slowly begins to flake off... The newspaper wrapped around the windowpanes begins to rip... THE MIRRORS ARE RESISTING AND ATTEMPTING TO SET THEMSELVES FREE. 107A INT. DAY - MIDWICH MONASTERY VESTIBULE 107A Ben is losing his calm. Time is running out. The nun reappears behind the wooden screen- SISTER Sister Anna has agreed to talk to you, you may proceed to the parlor next door. Ben crosses the hall and opens the door that the nun gestures him to. He enters the parlor alone. In the spare room, a chair stands by a wooden screen, fencing him off, once again. (CONTINUED) 80. 107A CONTINUED: 107A Behind the screen, a silhouette awaits him. SISTER ANNA St. John's closed down in 1952. Who are you? Ben sits down. Even at a short distance he cannot discern the face of Anna Esseker, who is now Sister Anna. BEN My name is Benjamin Carson. I work as a night watchman at 1229 West 38th Street in New York City, what used to be St. John's Hospital. SISTER ANNA What is it you want Mr. Carson? BEN I need your help. SISTER ANNA My help? I don't quite see how I could possibly be of any help. BEN My wife and children are in danger. What is threatening my family is asking for you... For a split second, Ben makes eye contact with Anna behind the screen. She has understood... BEN (CONT'D) If you don't help me I may lose the only thing that matters to me. SISTER ANNA I cannot leave the precincts. It's impossible. BEN Tell me why are the mirrors from the old hospital so determined to find you? Sister Anna remains silent- BEN (CONT'D) I must know, Sister. SISTER ANNA It is not the wish of the mirrors to find me, but of what is imprisoned inside them. The mirrors are merely windows on our world... (CONTINUED) 81. 107A CONTINUED: (2) 107A BEN A window... For what? For whom? ANNA At the time that I was at St. John's, Dr. Kane's therapy for personality disorders consisted of locking the patient up in a mirrored room for several days on end, in order to force him to confront his own image. I spent the darkest days of my life in that room. On the 6th day the nurses found me lifeless, almost dead. Since that day, I have never had another fit. But deep down inside I've always known the truth. BEN What truth? ANNA There is no cure for schizophrenia, it was something else, Mr. Carson. And whatever it was, it entered the mirror. We can feel the emotion in her voice. ANNA (CONT'D) I thought that after fifty years, this would have all gone away. They would have disappeared from the mirrors. I didn't know.... I'm sorry but if I agree to go with you and return to that place, I will make it possible for them to cross the threshold back into the real world. Everything is now making sense for Ben- BEN It entered with you and they need you to get out. ANNA The consequences of such an act, Mr. Carson, would be more devastating than letting them suffer where they are now. I'm going to pray for you and your family. That's all I can do right now, Mr. Carson. God bless you... She stands to leave. (CONTINUED) 82. 107A CONTINUED: (3) 107A BEN Wait... Please, listen to me- Terence Berry, Gary Lewis and many others before me... Those are the people who died trying to find you. Because they failed, their families died too. My sister was murdered two days ago... My wife and kids will next if you don't come with me. Look- From his wallet Ben takes out a wrinkled photograph of Michael, as a baby, in Amy's arms. Daisy stands next to them in the picture. Ben presses the photograph against the grating for Anna to look at it. BEN (CONT'D) My wife and two children. They're all I've got. They're innocent... Please. Anna stays quiet a moment behind the screen and leaves. BEN (CONT'D) I KNOW YOU ARE SCARED OF GOING BACK THERE. IT'S EASIER TO KEEP HIDING BUT THIS IS NOT THE HOUSE OF GOD ANYMORE. WHILE YOU'RE PRAYING PEOPLE ARE DYING ON YOUR TIME! Anna doesn't respond and disappears in the distance. Ben failed. He's desperate and lost. He has a hard time containing his anger. 105 EXT. DAY - MONASTERY 105

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what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

symmetry

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what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

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what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

nature

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what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

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what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

conversant

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what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

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what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

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what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

processions

How many times the word 'processions' appears in the text?

what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

waist

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what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

air

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what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

might

How many times the word 'might' appears in the text?

what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

hating

How many times the word 'hating' appears in the text?

what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

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what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

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what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

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what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

indeed

How many times the word 'indeed' appears in the text?

what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

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what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

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what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

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what sorrow will not such mutual confidence give consolation!--and with a last expression of tender love they parted, and went comparatively happy to their rooms. Chapter XI IPHIGENIA When Eleanor laid her head on her pillow that night, her mind was anxiously intent on some plan by which she might extricate her father from his misery; and, in her warm-hearted enthusiasm, self-sacrifice was decided on as the means to be adopted. Was not so good an Agamemnon worthy of an Iphigenia? She would herself personally implore John Bold to desist from his undertaking; she would explain to him her father's sorrows, the cruel misery of his position; she would tell him how her father would die if he were thus dragged before the public and exposed to such unmerited ignominy; she would appeal to his old friendship, to his generosity, to his manliness, to his mercy; if need were, she would kneel to him for the favour she would ask; but before she did this the idea of love must be banished. There must be no bargain in the matter. To his mercy, to his generosity, she could appeal; but as a pure maiden, hitherto even unsolicited, she could not appeal to his love, nor under such circumstances could she allow him to do so. Of course, when so provoked he would declare his passion; that was to be expected; there had been enough between them to make such a fact sure; but it was equally certain that he must be rejected. She could not be understood as saying, Make my father free and I am the reward. There would be no sacrifice in that;--not so had Jephthah's daughter saved her father;--not so could she show to that kindest, dearest of parents how much she was able to bear for his good. No; to one resolve must her whole soul be bound; and so resolving, she felt that she could make her great request to Bold with as much self-assured confidence as she could have done to his grandfather. And now I own I have fears for my heroine; not as to the upshot of her mission,--not in the least as to that; as to the full success of her generous scheme, and the ultimate result of such a project, no one conversant with human nature and novels can have a doubt; but as to the amount of sympathy she may receive from those of her own sex. Girls below twenty and old ladies above sixty will do her justice; for in the female heart the soft springs of sweet romance reopen after many years, and again gush out with waters pure as in earlier days, and greatly refresh the path that leads downwards to the grave. But I fear that the majority of those between these two eras will not approve of Eleanor's plan. I fear that unmarried ladies of thirty-five will declare that there can be no probability of so absurd a project being carried through; that young women on their knees before their lovers are sure to get kissed, and that they would not put themselves in such a position did they not expect it; that Eleanor is going to Bold only because circumstances prevent Bold from coming to her; that she is certainly a little fool, or a little schemer, but that in all probability she is thinking a good deal more about herself than her father. Dear ladies, you are right as to your appreciation of the circumstances, but very wrong as to Miss Harding's character. Miss Harding was much younger than you are, and could not, therefore, know, as you may do, to what dangers such an encounter might expose her. She may get kissed; I think it very probable that she will; but I give my solemn word and positive assurance, that the remotest idea of such a catastrophe never occurred to her as she made the great resolve now alluded to. And then she slept; and then she rose refreshed; and met her father with her kindest embrace and most loving smiles; and on the whole their breakfast was by no means so triste as had been their dinner the day before; and then, making some excuse to her father for so soon leaving him, she started on the commencement of her operations. She knew that John Bold was in London, and that, therefore, the scene itself could not be enacted to-day; but she also knew that he was soon to be home, probably on the next day, and it was necessary that some little plan for meeting him should be concerted with his sister Mary. When she got up to the house, she went, as usual, into the morning sitting-room, and was startled by perceiving, by a stick, a greatcoat, and sundry parcels which were lying about, that Bold must already have returned. "John has come back so suddenly," said Mary, coming into the room; "he has been travelling all night." "Then I'll come up again some other time," said Eleanor, about to beat a retreat in her sudden dismay. "He's out now, and will be for the next two hours," said the other; "he's with that horrid Finney; he only came to see him, and he returns by the mail train tonight." Returns by the mail train tonight, thought Eleanor to herself, as she strove to screw up her courage;--away again tonight;--then it must be now or never; and she again sat down, having risen to go. She wished the ordeal could have been postponed: she had fully made up her mind to do the deed, but she had not made up her mind to do it this very day; and now she felt ill at ease, astray, and in difficulty. "Mary," she began, "I must see your brother before he goes back." "Oh yes, of course," said the other; "I know he'll be delighted to see you;" and she tried to treat it as a matter of course, but she was not the less surprised; for Mary and Eleanor had daily talked over John Bold and his conduct, and his love, and Mary would insist on calling Eleanor her sister, and would scold her for not calling Bold by his Christian name; and Eleanor would half confess her love, but like a modest maiden would protest against such familiarities even with the name of her lover; and so they talked hour after hour, and Mary Bold, who was much the elder, looked forward with happy confidence to the day when Eleanor would not be ashamed to call her her sister. She was, however, fully sure that just at present Eleanor would be much more likely to avoid her brother than to seek him. "Mary, I must see your brother, now, to-day, and beg from him a great favour;" and she spoke with a solemn air, not at all usual to her; and then she went on, and opened to her friend all her plan, her well-weighed scheme for saving her father from a sorrow which would, she said, if it lasted, bring him to his grave. "But, Mary," she continued, "you must now, you know, cease any joking about me and Mr Bold; you must now say no more about that; I am not ashamed to beg this favour from your brother, but when I have done so, there can never be anything further between us;" and this she said with a staid and solemn air, quite worthy of Jephthah's daughter or of Iphigenia either. It was quite clear that Mary Bold did not follow the argument. That Eleanor Harding should appeal, on behalf of her father, to Bold's better feelings seemed to Mary quite natural; it seemed quite natural that he should relent, overcome by such filial tears, and by so much beauty; but, to her thinking, it was at any rate equally natural, that having relented, John should put his arm round his mistress's waist, and say: "Now having settled that, let us be man and wife, and all will end happily!" Why his good nature should not be rewarded, when such reward would operate to the disadvantage of none, Mary, who had more sense than romance, could not understand; and she said as much. Eleanor, however, was firm, and made quite an eloquent speech to support her own view of the question: she could not condescend, she said, to ask such a favour on any other terms than those proposed. Mary might, perhaps, think her high-flown, but she had her own ideas, and she could not submit to sacrifice her self-respect. "But I am sure you love him;--don't you?" pleaded Mary; "and I am sure he loves you better than anything in the world." Eleanor was going to make another speech, but a tear came to each eye, and she could not; so she pretended to blow her nose, and walked to the window, and made a little inward call on her own courage, and finding herself somewhat sustained, said sententiously: "Mary, this is nonsense." "But you do love him," said Mary, who had followed her friend to the window, and now spoke with her arms close wound round the other's waist. "You do love him with all your heart,--you know you do; I defy you to deny it." "I--" commenced Eleanor, turning sharply round to refute the charge; but the intended falsehood stuck in her throat, and never came to utterance. She could not deny her love, so she took plentifully to tears, and leant upon her friend's bosom and sobbed there, and protested that, love or no love, it would make no difference in her resolve, and called Mary, a thousand times, the most cruel of girls, and swore her to secrecy by a hundred oaths, and ended by declaring that the girl who could betray her friend's love, even to a brother, would be as black a traitor as a soldier in a garrison who should open the city gates to the enemy. While they were yet discussing the matter, Bold returned, and Eleanor was forced into sudden action: she had either to accomplish or abandon her plan; and having slipped into her friend's bedroom, as the gentleman closed the hall door, she washed the marks of tears from her eyes, and resolved within herself to go through with it. "Tell him I am here," said she, "and coming in; and mind, whatever you do, don't leave us." So Mary informed her brother, with a somewhat sombre air, that Miss Harding was in the next room, and was coming to speak to him. Eleanor was certainly thinking more of her father than herself, as she arranged her hair before the glass, and removed the traces of sorrow from her face; and yet I should be untrue if I said that she was not anxious to appear well before her lover: why else was she so sedulous with that stubborn curl that would rebel against her hand, and smooth so eagerly her ruffled ribands? why else did she damp her eyes to dispel the redness, and bite her pretty lips to bring back the colour? Of course she was anxious to look her best, for she was but a mortal angel after all. But had she been immortal, had she flitted back to the sitting-room on a cherub's wings, she could not have had a more faithful heart, or a truer wish to save her father at any cost to herself. John Bold had not met her since the day when she left him in dudgeon in the cathedral close. Since then his whole time had been occupied in promoting the cause against her father, and not unsuccessfully. He had often thought of her, and turned over in his mind a hundred schemes for showing her how disinterested was his love. He would write to her and beseech her not to allow the performance of a public duty to injure him in her estimation; he would write to Mr Harding, explain all his views, and boldly claim the warden's daughter, urging that the untoward circumstances between them need be no bar to their ancient friendship, or to a closer tie; he would throw himself on his knees before his mistress; he would wait and marry the daughter when the father has lost his home and his income; he would give up the lawsuit and go to Australia, with her of course, leaving _The Jupiter_ and Mr Finney to complete the case between them. Sometimes as he woke in the morning fevered and impatient, he would blow out his brains and have done with all his cares;--but this idea was generally consequent on an imprudent supper enjoyed in company with Tom Towers. How beautiful Eleanor appeared to him as she slowly walked into the room! Not for nothing had all those little cares been taken. Though her sister, the archdeacon's wife, had spoken slightingly of her charms, Eleanor was very beautiful when seen aright. Hers was not of those impassive faces, which have the beauty of a marble bust; finely chiselled features, perfect in every line, true to the rules of symmetry, as lovely to a stranger as to a friend, unvarying unless in sickness, or as age affects them. She had no startling brilliancy of beauty, no pearly whiteness, no radiant carnation. She had not the majestic contour that rivets attention, demands instant wonder, and then disappoints by the coldness of its charms. You might pass Eleanor Harding in the street without notice, but you could hardly pass an evening with her and not lose your heart. She had never appeared more lovely to her lover than she now did. Her face was animated though it was serious, and her full dark lustrous eyes shone with anxious energy; her hand trembled as she took his, and she could hardly pronounce his name, when she addressed him. Bold wished with all his heart that the Australian scheme was in the act of realisation, and that he and Eleanor were away together, never to hear further of the lawsuit. He began to talk, asked after her health,--said something about London being very stupid, and more about Barchester being very pleasant; declared the weather to be very hot, and then inquired after Mr Harding. "My father is not very well," said Eleanor. John Bold was very sorry,--so sorry: he hoped it was nothing serious, and put on the unmeaningly solemn face which people usually use on such occasions. "I especially want to speak to you about my father, Mr Bold; indeed, I am now here on purpose to do so. Papa is very unhappy, very unhappy indeed, about this affair of the hospital: you would pity him, Mr Bold, if you could see how wretched it has made him." "Oh, Miss Harding!" "Indeed you would;--anyone would pity him; but a friend, an old friend as you are,--indeed you would. He is an altered man; his cheerfulness has all gone, and his sweet temper, and his kind happy tone of voice; you would hardly know him if you saw him, Mr Bold, he is so much altered; and--and--if this goes on, he will die." Here Eleanor had recourse to her handkerchief, and so also had her auditors; but she plucked up her courage, and went on with her tale. "He will break his heart, and die. I am sure, Mr Bold, it was not you who wrote those cruel things in the newspaper--" John Bold eagerly protested that it was not, but his heart smote him as to his intimate alliance with Tom Towers. "No, I am sure it was not; and papa has not for a moment thought so; you would not be so cruel;--but it has nearly killed him. Papa cannot bear to think that people should so speak of him, and that everybody should hear him so spoken of:--they have called him avaricious, and dishonest, and they say he is robbing the old men, and taking the money of the hospital for nothing." "I have never said so, Miss Harding. I--" "No," continued Eleanor, interrupting him, for she was now in the full flood-tide of her eloquence; "no, I am sure you have not; but others have said so; and if this goes on, if such things are written again, it will kill papa. Oh! Mr Bold, if you only knew the state he is in! Now papa does not care much about money." Both her auditors, brother and sister, assented to this, and declared on their own knowledge that no man lived less addicted to filthy lucre than the warden. "Oh! it's so kind of you to say so, Mary, and of you too, Mr Bold. I couldn't bear that people should think unjustly of papa. Do you know he would give up the hospital altogether, only he cannot. The archdeacon says it would be cowardly, and that he would be deserting his order, and injuring the church. Whatever may happen, papa will not do that: he would leave the place to-morrow willingly, and give up his house, and the income and all, if the archdeacon--" Eleanor was going to say "would let him," but she stopped herself before she had compromised her father's dignity; and giving a long sigh, she added--"Oh, I do so wish he would." "No one who knows Mr Harding personally accuses him for a moment," said Bold. "It is he that has to bear the punishment; it is he that suffers," said Eleanor; "and what for? what has he done wrong? how has he deserved this persecution? he that never had an unkind thought in his life, he that never said an unkind word!" and here she broke down, and the violence of her sobs stopped her utterance. Bold, for the fifth or sixth time, declared that neither he nor any of his friends imputed any blame personally to Mr Harding. "Then why should he be persecuted?" ejaculated Eleanor through her tears, forgetting in her eagerness that her intention had been to humble herself as a suppliant before John Bold;--"why should he be singled out for scorn and disgrace? why should he be made so wretched? Oh! Mr Bold,"--and she turned towards him as though the kneeling scene were about to be commenced,--"oh! Mr Bold, why did you begin all this? You, whom we all so--so--valued!" To speak the truth, the reformer's punishment was certainly come upon him, for his present plight was not enviable; he had nothing for it but to excuse himself by platitudes about public duty, which it is by no means worth while to repeat, and to reiterate his eulogy on Mr Harding's character. His position was certainly a cruel one: had any gentleman called upon him on behalf of Mr Harding he could of course have declined to enter upon the subject; but how could he do so with a beautiful girl, with the daughter of the man whom he had injured, with his own love? In the meantime Eleanor recollected herself, and again summoned up her energies. "Mr Bold," said she, "I have come here to implore you to abandon this proceeding." He stood up from his seat, and looked beyond measure distressed. "To implore you to abandon it, to implore you to spare my father, to spare either his life or his reason, for one or the other will pay the forfeit if this goes on. I know how much I am asking, and how little right I have to ask anything; but I think you will listen to me as it is for my father. Oh, Mr Bold, pray, pray do this for us;--pray do not drive to distraction a man who has loved you so well." She did not absolutely kneel to him, but she followed him as he moved from his chair, and laid her soft hands imploringly upon his arm. Ah! at any other time how exquisitely valuable would have been that touch! but now he was distraught, dumbfounded, and unmanned. What could he say to that sweet suppliant; how explain to her that the matter now was probably beyond his control; how tell her that he could not quell the storm which he had raised? "Surely, surely, John, you cannot refuse her," said his sister. "I would give her my soul," said he, "if it would serve her." "Oh, Mr Bold," said Eleanor, "do not speak so; I ask nothing for myself; and what I ask for my father, it cannot harm you to grant." "I would give her my soul, if it would serve her," said Bold, still addressing his sister; "everything I have is hers, if she will accept it; my house, my heart, my all; every hope of my breast is centred in her; her smiles are sweeter to me than the sun, and when I see her in sorrow as she now is, every nerve in my body suffers. No man can love better than I love her." "No, no, no," ejaculated Eleanor; "there can be no talk of love between us. Will you protect my father from the evil you have brought upon him?" "Oh, Eleanor, I will do anything; let me tell you how I love you!" "No, no, no!" she almost screamed. "This is unmanly of you, Mr Bold. Will you, will you, will you leave my father to die in peace in his quiet home?" and seizing him by his arm and hand, she followed him across the room towards the door. "I will not leave you till you promise me; I'll cling to you in the street; I'll kneel to you before all the people. You shall promise me this, you shall promise me this, you shall--" And she clung to him with fixed tenacity, and reiterated her resolve with hysterical passion. "Speak to her, John; answer her," said Mary, bewildered by the unexpected vehemence of Eleanor's manner; "you cannot have the cruelty to refuse her." "Promise me, promise me," said Eleanor; "say that my father is safe;--one word will do. I know how true you are; say one word, and I will let you go." She still held him, and looked eagerly into his face, with her hair dishevelled and her eyes all bloodshot. She had no thought now of herself, no care now for her appearance; and yet he thought he had never seen her half so lovely; he was amazed at the intensity of her beauty, and could hardly believe that it was she whom he had dared to love. "Promise me," said she; "I will not leave you till you have promised me." "I will," said he at length; "I do--all I can do, I will do." "Then may God Almighty bless you for ever and ever!" said Eleanor; and falling on her knees with her face in Mary's lap, she wept and sobbed like a child: her strength had carried her through her allotted task, but now it was well nigh exhausted. In a while she was partly recovered, and got up to go, and would have gone, had not Bold made her understand that it was necessary for him to explain to her how far it was in his power to put an end to the proceedings which had been taken against Mr Harding. Had he spoken on any other subject, she would have vanished, but on that she was bound to hear him; and now the danger of her position commenced. While she had an active part to play, while she clung to him as a suppliant, it was easy enough for her to reject his proffered love, and cast from her his caressing words; but now--now that he had yielded, and was talking to her calmly and kindly as to her father's welfare, it was hard enough for her to do so. Then Mary Bold assisted her; but now she was quite on her brother's side. Mary said but little, but every word she did say gave some direct and deadly blow. The first thing she did was to make room for her brother between herself and Eleanor on the sofa: as the sofa was full large for three, Eleanor could not resent this, nor could she show suspicion by taking another seat; but she felt it to be a most unkind proceeding. And then Mary would talk as though they three were joined in some close peculiar bond together; as though they were in future always to wish together, contrive together, and act together; and Eleanor could not gainsay this; she could not make another speech, and say, "Mr Bold and I are strangers, Mary, and are always to remain so!" He explained to her that, though undoubtedly the proceeding against the hospital had commenced solely with himself, many others were now interested in the matter, some of whom were much more influential than himself; that it was to him alone, however, that the lawyers looked for instruction as to their doings, and, more important still, for the payment of their bills; and he promised that he would at once give them notice that it was his intention to abandon the cause. He thought, he said, that it was not probable that any active steps would be taken after he had seceded from the matter, though it was possible that some passing allusion might still be made to the hospital in the daily _Jupiter_. He promised, however, that he would use his best influence to prevent any further personal allusion being made to Mr Harding. He then suggested that he would on that afternoon ride over himself to Dr Grantly, and inform him of his altered intentions on the subject, and with this view, he postponed his immediate return to London. This was all very pleasant, and Eleanor did enjoy a sort of triumph in the feeling that she had attained the object for which she had sought this interview; but still the part of Iphigenia was to be played out. The gods had heard her prayer, granted her request, and were they not to have their promised sacrifice? Eleanor was not a girl to defraud them wilfully; so, as soon as she decently could, she got up for her bonnet. "Are you going so soon?" said Bold, who half an hour since would have given a hundred pounds that he was in London, and she still at Barchester. "Oh yes!" said she. "I am so much obliged to you; papa will feel this to be so kind." She did not quite appreciate all her father's feelings. "Of course I must tell him, and I will say that you will see the archdeacon." "But may I not say one word for myself?" said Bold. "I'll fetch you your bonnet, Eleanor," said Mary, in the act of leaving the room. "Mary, Mary," said she, getting up and catching her by her dress; "don't go, I'll get my bonnet myself." But Mary, the traitress, stood fast by the door, and permitted no such retreat. Poor Iphigenia! And with a volley of impassioned love, John Bold poured forth the feelings of his heart, swearing, as men do, some truths and many falsehoods; and Eleanor repeated with every shade of vehemence the "No, no, no," which had had a short time since so much effect; but now, alas! its strength was gone. Let her be never so vehement, her vehemence was not respected; all her "No, no, no's" were met with counter-asseverations, and at last were overpowered. The ground was cut from under her on every side. She was pressed to say whether her father would object; whether she herself had any aversion (aversion! God help her, poor girl! the word nearly made her jump into his arms); any other preference (this she loudly disclaimed); whether it was impossible that she should love him (Eleanor could not say that it was impossible): and so at last all her defences demolished, all her maiden barriers swept away, she capitulated, or rather marched out with the honours of war, vanquished evidently, palpably vanquished, but still not reduced to the necessity of confessing it. And so the altar on the shore of the modern Aulis reeked with no sacrifice. Chapter XII MR BOLD'S VISIT TO PLUMSTEAD Whether or no the ill-natured prediction made by certain ladies in the beginning of the last chapter was or was not carried out to the letter, I am not in a position to state. Eleanor, however, certainly did feel herself to have been baffled as she returned home with all her news to her father. Certainly she had been victorious, certainly she had achieved her object, certainly she was not unhappy, and yet she did not feel herself triumphant. Everything would run smooth now. Eleanor was not at all addicted to the Lydian school of romance; she by no means objected to her lover because he came in at the door under the name of Absolute, instead of pulling her out of a window under the name of Beverley; and yet she felt that she had been imposed upon, and could hardly think of Mary Bold with sisterly charity. "I did think I could have trusted Mary," she said to herself over and over again. "Oh that she should have dared to keep me in the room when I tried to get out!" Eleanor, however, felt that the game was up, and that she had now nothing further to do but to add to the budget of news which was prepared for her father, that John Bold was her accepted lover. We will, however, now leave her on her way, and go with John Bold to Plumstead Episcopi, merely premising that Eleanor on reaching home will not find things so smooth as she fondly expected; two messengers had come, one to her father and the other to the archdeacon, and each of them much opposed to her quiet mode of

old

How many times the word 'old' appears in the text?

when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

briefcase

How many times the word 'briefcase' appears in the text?

when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

fbi

How many times the word 'fbi' appears in the text?

when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

departure

How many times the word 'departure' appears in the text?

when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

village

How many times the word 'village' appears in the text?

when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

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when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

basement

How many times the word 'basement' appears in the text?

when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

turned

How many times the word 'turned' appears in the text?

when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

phrases

How many times the word 'phrases' appears in the text?

when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

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when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

outside

How many times the word 'outside' appears in the text?

when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

circumstances

How many times the word 'circumstances' appears in the text?

when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

similar

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when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

going

How many times the word 'going' appears in the text?

when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

gone

How many times the word 'gone' appears in the text?

when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

hint

How many times the word 'hint' appears in the text?

when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

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when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

these

How many times the word 'these' appears in the text?

when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

water

How many times the word 'water' appears in the text?

when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

week

How many times the word 'week' appears in the text?

when you plan on missing class. There were students waiting for you. ED Yes. I know. I'm just having some personal problems. MRS MASTRIONI Anyway, the Dean wants to see you. ED The Dean? MRS MASTRIONI Yes. Can you come in today? ED No. What does he want to see me about? MRS MASTRIONI I don't know. ED Is it about me missing classes? MRS MASTRIONI It might be. ED What's that supposed to mean? MRS MASTRIONI It means that if I was the Dean, and I wanted to see you, that is what it would be about. ED What kind of bullshit is that? MRS MASTRIONI There's no need to get upset, Mr Saxon. ED Am I being fired? Is that it? MRS MASTRIONI Look, I don't know. The Dean said he wanted to see you. ED Well, I can't see him. MRS MASTRIONI Personal problems? ED That's right. Yes. MRS MASTRIONI That's too bad. ED Yes it is too bad. Because I know what you're trying to do. MRS MASTRIONI Really? What's that? ED You know what? Why don't you tell the Dean to go fuck himself? MRS MASTRIONI Mr Saxon... ED And you go fuck yourself too. MRS MASTRIONI Does this mean that you won't be coming to class tomorrow? ED Fuck you! Ed slams the phone down. INT. BATHROOM Ed takes the bottle of Midol from the medicine cabinet and takes a few more. Then he notices a trail of pink water leading from the toilet, along the bathroom floor and into the hallway. He follows the trail. INT. HALLWAY The trail leads up to the pinkie finger. Ed watches while the finger moves, inchworm-like, across the floor, toward Eve's room, leaving a wet trail behind it. Ed watches for a second while he decides what to do. He quickly grabs the finger and takes it to the kitchen sink. He drops it in the sink, pushes it down the drain and flicks the garbage disposal on. He turns the water on and leaves it running until it sounds like there is nothing left of the finger. When he turns it off, he sticks his hand in, searching for any remnants of the finger. It appears to have gone down. He takes the sponge and wets it. INT. HALLWAY He wipes up the trail of the finger, following it back into the bathroom. INT. BATHROOM He looks at the toilet, which is still stuffed up. INT. BASEMENT Ed searches around the basement for a plunger. The basement is full of strange sounds, all ruminating from the exposed pipes. He finds a plunger among some other tools and starts back upstairs, but on his way upstairs, he finds that there is a puddle of water on the floor. He traces the source of the puddle to the pipe that was only moist before. It is now dripping slowly and a large pool of dirty water is collecting in the shallow recess of the cement floor. Ed stares into the murky, black pool. There is a knock on the door upstairs and Ed turns to answer it. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed answers the door and sees that it is now dark outside. GEOFFREY COSTAS stands outside. Geoffrey, 54, is a wise, patient man. He is formal and calm in his manner, but these qualities belie a warm emotional vulnerability. Physically, he is not small or weak. One gets the impression that he wasn't always so kind. GEOFFREY Mr Saxon? ED Yes. GEOFFREY Hello. My name is Geoffrey Costas. I'm from Human Support Services. ED I'm not interested. GEOFFREY Detective Derm asked me to stop by. He hands him a business card. Ed takes the card and looks it over. GEOFFREY You've been hit. ED I'm fine. I don't need a doctor. He tries to hand the card back. GEOFFREY Oh, I'm not a physician. I'm a psychiatrist. But I'm not here on business. This is my time off. ED This is a personal visit? I don't understand. GEOFFREY Human Services is a volunteer organization. We offer assistance to victims of traumatic crimes. ED What kind of assistance? GEOFFREY Advice, support, a shoulder to cry on. ED Why would I want to cry on your shoulder? GEOFFREY Maybe you just want someone to talk to. It can be a lonely world when those you love are taken from you. ED No. I don't think so. GEOFFREY Well, you have my card. If you feel like talking at another time, please feel free to call. ED Actually, there is something you can help me with. I've been having trouble sleeping. GEOFFREY That's understandable, under the circumstances. ED Is there something you can give me? GEOFFREY You mean a prescription? ED You're a doctor, aren't you? GEOFFREY Yes. ED I can't seem to find anything strong enough. GEOFFREY You're anxious. ED Yes. I can't sleep. It makes me anxious. Or maybe I can't sleep because I'm anxious. I don't know. GEOFFREY How long has this been going on? ED A long time. GEOFFREY Weeks? ED Oh, yes. GEOFFREY You must have slept some. ED Maybe I do. But I don't seem to get the benefits. I never feel rested. There just doesn't seem to be the time to relax anymore. I'm always two steps behind. I have to stop the thinking. The longer I stay awake, the more my thoughts become frantic, irrational. If I don't get some sleep soon, nothing is going to make any sense. GEOFFREY I see. May I come in? ED Yes. Come in. Geoffrey comes in and places his briefcase on the table inside. GEOFFREY There are times when the pressures of everyday life become overwhelming. As a doctor, I notice more and more of my patients experiencing similar symptoms. I'm afraid it's a sign of the times, as much as anything else. ED Can you help me? GEOFFREY Like I said, I'm not here on a professional basis. Your insomnia is merely a symptom of a greater unwholesomeness. A lasting treatment may be extremely hard to come by. There's very little we can hope to accomplish with pharmaceuticals alone. However, under the circumstances, I can give you something to help you sleep. Do you have health insurance? ED Yes, through work. Geoffrey takes a prescription pad from his briefcase and scribbles out a prescription. GEOFFREY The prescription I'm going to write for you is expensive, so I recommend you save the receipt for your insurance company. I'm sure they'll cover it. These pills are quite new. I've been prescribing them to my patients who travel a great deal, for their jet lag. They will help stabilize your internal clock by chemically suppressing certain amino acids in your brain. ED Will it help me sleep? GEOFFREY Oh, yes. Now, take two at night, and don't take more than six in a day. OK? ED Yes. Thank you. Geoffrey shuts his briefcase and starts to leave. GEOFFREY I'm glad I could help. How about I check in on you tomorrow afternoon? ED Tomorrow? GEOFFREY To see how you're doing? ED I don't know. GEOFFREY For what it's worth, I understand your position better than you think. Don't shut it all out. Sometimes that fragile connection to the rest of the world is all we have. I sincerely hope things turn out for you. Tomorrow then? ED Tomorrow. Ed shuts the door behind Geoffrey. INT. BATHROOM Ed works the plunger in the toilet. The water is still pink from the finger, but also might be pink from the pink toilet paper that is now broken up and mixed in with the water. He plunges the toilet a few more times and then stops to see if it is working. The water slowly goes down. He reaches behind the toilet and turns the water back on. He flushes it and it seems to be working again, albeit weakly. He sits on the edge of the bathtub and takes a breath. The water in the tub hasn't gone down, so he takes the plunger and starts to work it over the drain. After a minute, he sees that it isn't working. He reaches into the drain and pulls out a huge clump of scum-filled hair. It is repulsive to Ed. He throws it into the toilet. The water in the bathtub still hasn't gone down. INT. KITCHEN He searches under the sink through an exhaustive supply of cleaning supplies. He eventually pulls out a king-size container of Drano. INT. BATHROOM He reads the back of the container quickly, then pours the whole thing down the drain. He watches it for a second, waiting for it to go down. Slowly, then softly, the piano can be heard playing in the other room. Ed listens to it before following it down the hallway. INT. HALLWAY The lamp on Eve's writing desk is on and it lights up the end of the hallway. The music still seems to be coming from her room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed comes in and looks around the room. There is no one playing the piano, but the music continues over the rest of the scene. Ed's attention turns to the diary, which is still sitting on the desk where he left it. Ed sits in the chair and starts paging through Eve's diary. The piano continues playing. We hear Eve's voice as it must have been when she was writing. EVE (V.O.) More than three weeks late. Damn. I'm so stupid. I haven't told George because I'm sure he would use this as an excuse to pressure me to leave Ed. And how can I tell Ed. There's no way he could be the father. We haven't had sex in months. He would know it isn't is. Ed flips back a few pages. As he does, the camera starts to travel around the room, passing the piano, and then a few pictures from Eve's past, then some souvenirs on a shelf. EVE (V.O.) Saw a movie last night with George. It was awful; just the kind of movie Ed hates. I wanted to tell him about it, but I couldn't. I told him I was at Susie's. George loved it, of course. I think he likes every movie. Still, it was nice to go out on a date like that. It was fun. INT. HALLWAY Now the camera has turned to the empty hallway. It slowly moves toward the bathroom. EVE (V.O.) Ed came home in a shitty mood and started picking a fight with me about a coffee cup I broke last week. It was the last thing I needed, today especially. Sometimes I fucking hate him. He can be such a shit. INT. KITCHEN The camera pans over the glass that has Eve's lipstick on it. EVE (V.O.) I can't believe what a jock George is. I knew he worked out, but he really takes car of himself. After we had sex, I was embarrassed to let him see me naked. How could I have gotten so fat? I'm going back to the gym tomorrow. I've really let myself go to pot. Maybe I'll get him a softball bat for his birthday next week. INT. BATHROOM The camera comes into the bathroom and passes over all of Eve's things sitting on the back of the toilet. EVE (V.O.) Ed doesn't sleep anymore. He's beginning to scare me. He takes all these pills to help him sleep, but they only make it worse. And he hates me. I can see it in his eyes. He blames me for everything that went wrong in his life. Maybe he's right. Maybe it is my fault. I feel so guilty about George that I can't argue with him anymore. I can't keep this up much longer. Fuck it. I'm going to tell him about George tomorrow. He knows anyway. He must know. He's been acting so weird. Poor Ed. He used to have so much ambition. And he's so talented. I just wish things had turned out better. The camera turns toward the bathtub, and focuses slowly in on the drain. A few bubbles pop out from under the water and the water starts to drain out. As the camera dollies in on the drain, the last of the murky water disappears. Ed, now standing in the bathroom, strikes a match and holds it up to the diary until the corner finally catches on fire. He fans out the pages so that it will catch more. When he can't hold it anymore, he drops it into the bathtub and watches it burn. He watches it until it has burnt itself out, burning into a pile of thick, black ashes. INT. HALLWAY Ed looks up at the smoke alarm. He tries to pull it down, but it is out of his reach. Ed grabs a chair from the living room and stands on it so that he can reach the alarm. He pulls the cover off the alarm and then the battery out and the alarm is finally silenced. Then he hears voices coming from outside the front door. He approaches the front door cautiously, then puts his ear up to the door and listens. The voices are muted and whispered, but Ed can still hear what is being said, although it is hard to tell who is talking. HARVEY (O.S.) No. I won't. SADIE (O.S.) You are so crazy. HARVEY (O.S.) I'm crazy? What about you? SADIE (O.S.) Quiet. He's going to hear you. HARVEY (O.S.) So what if he hears me. Who is he, anyway? SADIE (O.S.) God, you are being such an asshole. Ed opens the door quickly. EXT. PORCH - NIGHT Sadie and Harvey freeze like caught children. HARVEY, 19, looks younger than his is; his facial hair isn't capable yet of filling out his meager goatee. He seems hurt, like a spoiled child who hasn't gotten his way. ED What's going on? SADIE Christ. I'm so sorry. HARVEY Who's this? Is this him? SADIE Will you shut up? HARVEY He's so old. ED Excuse me? SADIE Can we just go inside? Please? Ed lets Sadie inside. HARVEY So that's it? You're going with him now? SADIE You really don't understand anything. HARVEY You said you loved me. SADIE Jesus. Would you shut up? You are so embarrassing. HARVEY Embarrassing? I'll tell you what's embarrassing. You with this fucking geriatric old man. That's embarrassing. ED You little shit. Ed makes a move toward Harvey, but Harvey backs away quickly. HARVEY Don't touch me! SADIE Let's just go in, OK? He'll leave. HARVEY User. SADIE Stalker. Psycho. HARVEY Slut. Sadie slams the door on him. INT. LIVING ROOM Sadie stands staring at the floor. SADIE I can't believe that. You know, he followed me here. ED He followed you? SADIE Yeah. Do you believe it? Oh my God. What happened to you? ED Somebody hit me. SADIE Are you alright? ED I'm fine. SADIE Who hit you? ED I really don't want to get into it. SADIE I nearly had a heart attack when the police called me. ED What did they ask you? SADIE Just about me being here. About what happened. ED But nothing happened. SADIE That's what I told them. ED They found your sweater. It has blood all over it. SADIE You're kidding. ED You left it under the bed. SADIE Oh, yeah. Damn. I don't know why I do things like that. ED What if my wife had found it? SADIE Oh. Is she here? ED No. Look, Sadie. I don't want you to get the wrong idea. SADIE Don't be mad. It's just that I worry too much. You didn't come to class again. And you said you would. I started getting all these ideas. I called you, but nobody answered. I meant to bring your wife's sweater back, but I forgot it. ED Actually, I'm glad you're here. Can you do me a favor? SADIE Sure. Anything. ED I have to get a prescription filled. SADIE No problem. Ed finds the prescription on his desk. ED I'd go myself, but I'm expecting a phone call. SADIE Sure. He hands her the prescription. ED There's a twenty-four pharmacy on Market. SADIE I know the one. I go there all the time. It's like my second home. ED I'll give you my credit card. Ed finds his wallet and hands her the card. SADIE I'll be back in a minute. ED Thank you. Sadie skips out the door and Ed shuts it behind her. INT. BATHROOM Ed turns on the shower, washing the ashes down the drain. After he's watched them go down, he takes a sponge and cleans off the burnt mark in the tub as best he can. He turns the shower on, rinsing it out. He turns the shower off and hears the phone is ringing. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed picks up the phone. DERM Mr Saxon? Detective Derm. ED Yes, hi. DERM I wanted to let you know that we've taken Mr Simian into custody. ED I understand. DERM We found him at his place of work. ED At the school? DERM Yes. We arrested him there. He'll come up for arraignment tomorrow morning and then, as far as I can tell, he'll probably be released on his own recognizance. ED I see. DERM It's just standard procedure, but I thought I'd keep you informed. ED Yes. Thank you. Did he say anything about Eve? DERM Try to rest, Mr Saxon. We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. ED I will. Thank you. DERM Good night. Ed hangs up the phone. Then he hears some sounds coming from Eve's room. INT. EVE'S ROOM Ed takes a few steps into Eve's room. He traces the noises to the window and looks out at the neighbor's house. The light is on in the neighbor's window, and there are some vague shadows moving around on the closed curtain. As the noises get louder, it soon becomes clear that the neighbors are having sex. Ed peers out at the light in the window, listening to the woman's increasing moans. The woman seems to be in some sort of painful, orgasmic delight. In other words, it mostly sounds like she is having a good time, but there should be a growing suspicion that not all is right. WOMAN (O.S.) Oh. Oh. Oh! Oh! OH! OH! NO! NO! NO! Ed backs slowly away from the window. He hears someone knocking on the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the door and Sadie comes in holding a colorful paper bag. ED Thank you. Ed takes the bag from Sadie and goes into the kitchen. INT. KITCHEN Sadie follows him in. Ed opens the pills quickly and swallows three of them with a glass of water. SADIE Those pills cost a lot. They must be strong. ED They're sleeping pills. I've been having trouble sleeping. SADIE You must have anxiety. I can never get to sleep when I'm anxious. ED I am anxious. Yes. Sadie takes some other stuff out of the bag. One of the items is an individually wrapped Skin-EE( fat-free cookie, chocolate, chocolate chip. SADIE I got you some peroxide and stuff. And a cookie. I haven't eaten today. ED You put it all on my credit card, right? SADIE Actually, I paid for it. They wouldn't take your card. ED Why not? SADIE They said you hadn't paid your bill, on the phone. They called the credit card people when it didn't go through. ED Damn. Well, I'll pay you back. SADIE It's OK. I charged it to my Dad. I don't even pay the bill. ED No, those pills are expensive. And my insurance will cover it anyway. SADIE Pay me back later, then. Really, it's OK. ED Are you sure? SADIE It's fine. I swear. Sadie looks at the cuts on his face. SADIE Your face must hurt. ED No. I don't seem to feel anything. SADIE It's nasty. Sadie takes a closer look. SADIE Here. Sit down. She sits Ed down at the kitchen table, under a light, and sits across from him, then takes the peroxide and some cotton swabs she bought at the pharmacy and starts to dress his wounds. ED I've never been hit before. SADIE Me neither. ED It's not so bad, really. It's humbling, but I like the effect it seems to have on people. It seems to make them more compassionate. There's a competitive market for suffering in the world. It's difficult to stand out from the handicapped and the homeless and the politically oppressed. Sometimes a little advertising helps remind people that you're a human being. SADIE It does make you look sort of cute, in a pathetic kind of way. ED Sadie. SADIE Are you really married? ED What? You think I just made it up? SADIE I don't know. Some people just say they're married, you know, because maybe they think it's more respectable or something. ED I'm not one of those people. SADIE I didn't mean to imply anything. It's just that you act sort of weird. ED I act weird? SADIE Not weird, really. Worried, I guess. Secretive. Like you're worried I might find out something about you. ED You don't want to get involved with my problems. SADIE Maybe I do. ED Believe me, you don't. SADIE I didn't mean to pry. Well, maybe I did. I'll just put a band-aid on it. ED Would you like a drink? I'm going to have one. 1tt1He finds a bottle of wine. SADIE You're not supposed to mix wine with sleeping pills. It increases the amount of medicine that's absorbed into the bloodstream. 1tt1Ed searches for a corkscrew and starts to open the bottle. ED I need all the help I can get. SADIE It's dangerous. ED It's just wine. I'll only have a glass. 1tt1He offers her some and she nods. He pours her a glass. Sadie takes her glass into the living room. Ed downs his glass of wine and refills it quickly before following her. INT. LIVING ROOM 1tt1She sits down at his desk. SADIE Are you working on anything new? ED No. I don't write anymore. SADIE Why not? ED I just don't have the time. I have to work all day. Time just slips by. SADIE I know what you mean. There's not enough time in the day. ED Not as much as there used to be. SADIE There used to be more? ED Yes. Before I had to work there was plenty of time. SADIE But you had all that stuff published. ED Sure, but it didn't pay very much. I had a lot of debts from school that needed to be paid off. And then, credit cards. And then I got married, bought a house. Life comes with all these expenses. And poetry just doesn't pay. I thought working at the University would at least give me summers off. SADIE Doesn't it? ED Not really. No. 1tt1There is a knock on the door. The idea that someone else might see them together makes it awkward for both of them. 1tt1Ed freezes for what seems like a long time; long enough for whoever it is to knock again. ED I better see who that is. SADIE Yeah. 1tt1Ed goes over to the door and opens it cautiously. It is Eve's friend, SUSIE. SUSIE Hi, it's me. ED Oh, hi Susie. 1tt1She is about to walk in, when Ed blocks her way. She can see Sadie sitting at Ed's desk holding a glass of wine. ED Eve's not here. SUSIE Oh. She came back though, didn't she? ED No, she didn't. SUSIE Oh no. Can I come in? EXT. PORCH - NIGHT 1tt1Ed, rather than let her in, pushes her outside and shuts the door behind her. ED No. I'm busy right now. I called the police. SUSIE What did they say? ED They're working on it. You can call them if you want. 1tt1Ed finds Derm's card in his pocket and hands it to her. SUSIE Aren't you worried? ED Of course I'm worried. I'm just working right now. This girl is one of my students. She wanted some help on an assignment. She doesn't know anything about Eve being missing. SUSIE What happened to you? ED George Simian hit me. SUSIE George? ED You know him. It figures. 1tt1Susie starts crying. Ed stares at her helplessly, then goes back inside. SUSIE Wait. 1tt1Ed stops. SUSIE Can I come back later? ED It's late. I just took some sleeping pills. I haven't slept much since this all started. Why don't you come back tomorrow? SUSIE Tomorrow? ED Good night, Susie. Ed walks back in, leaving Susie standing on the porch. INT. LIVING ROOM - NIGHT Ed waits by the door until he hears her footsteps walking away outside. Sadie stands up, looking nervous. SADIE 2t2Is that your wife? ED 2t2No. It was a friend of hers. SADIE 2t2I should go. ED 2t2No. Why? SADIE 2t2You must be tired. Those pills must be working. ED 2t2I don't think they're working at all. SADIE 2t2Still. You're married, right? ED 2t2Yeah, but, please don't go. Please. Time has a way of slowing down when you're around. SADIE 2t2Really? For me, too. ED 2t2So you'll stay? SADIE 2t2If you want me to. Ed comes over to her and kisses her. SADIE 2t2Can I ask you something? ED 2t2What? SADIE 2t2Do you think my writing is good? ED 2t2You've done some good work. SADIE 2t2Yeah. C minus good. ED 2t2I told you, I was in a bad mood when I graded that. SADIE 2t2I guess so. She is unresponsive at first. SADIE (to herself) 2t2What am I doing? They kiss for a minute, then Ed slips his hand under the back of Sadie's sweater. She kisses him again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie turns the lights off and we can only see by the light coming in from the hallway. Ed lies on the bed and Sadie lies next to him, under the covers. Ed slips his hand under the back of her sweater and fiddles with her bra while they kiss. The gurgling sound starts up again, and while Sadie doesn't notice, or doesn't hear it, it becomes increasingly distracting to Ed. He looks to the bathroom where the noise is coming from. INT. BATHROOM The camera focuses in on the drain. The water in the bathtub starts rising again. INT. BEDROOM Sadie breaks away from him, sits up and takes off her sweater. Ed takes off his shirt. Ed's kisses move around the side of her neck. As he reaches her ear, he looks up and notices Eve's clothes sitting on the chair. INT. BATHROOM The water is rising slowly, but we can see solid stuff (the ashes from the diary are clearly part of the muck) seeping out of the drain with the water. It is a cloudy, dark, disgusting water which probably stinks too. INT. BEDROOM Ed is trying to concentrate on Sadie, but he notices the closet door is open and there are some dresses blowing around inside. And the noise from the bathroom is getting louder. He turns Sadie onto her back, turning himself away from the closet. His kisses run down her chest until he gets to her jeans. He unbuttons her jeans and starts to pull them off, kissing as he goes. Ed has taken her pants off, but his passion and enthusiasm has faded, and he stops and stares off into space, towards the bathroom. He is spooked. SADIE 2t2What's wrong? He looks down and sees Sadie staring at him. ED 2t2I don't know. Maybe it's those pills. I don't know. SADIE 2t2Just relax. Lie back. Sadie gently pushes him back and starts to go down on him. Ed get more uptight. ED 2t2No. Please. Just stop. She keeps trying until Ed is forced to push her away. ED 2t2It's just not working. OK? SADIE 2t2Alright. I'm sorry. Sadie turns away. She's upset. SADIE 2t2Maybe I should go. ED 2t2No. Please, don't. It's my fault. Please. Don't go. SADIE 2t2Damn, I'm so stupid. ED 2t2No, it's me. Please. SADIE 2t2This was a mistake. Sadie gets up and puts on her shirt. She grabs the rest of her clothes and goes into the living room. Ed stares after her, listening to her finish dressing herself and then leave. The clock next to the bed is ticking loudly and the sound of the ticking continues of the next few scenes, as indicated. INT. KITCHEN Ed pours a few more pills into his hand, swallowing them with some wine from the bottle. INT. BATHROOM Ed looks at the bathtub, which is full of the murky water. He picks up the plunger, which is still by the toilet, and starts working it on the drain. More stuff is coming up, making the water darker, but as he relaxes the plunger, the water doesn't go down. If anything, the gurgling sound is louder. He works the plunger some more, more vigorously and then, again, relaxes it and watches the drain hopefully. The gurgling noise seems closer and the water still does not go down. Then he hears something hit the front door. INT. LIVING ROOM Ed opens the front door and picks up the newspaper which has just been thrown. He puts it with the other newspapers, which have piled up in their plastic wraps on his desk. INT. BATHROOM He comes back into the bathroom and looks at the bathtub. He puts the plunger over the drain and works it much harder and, this time, after a few seconds, there is a loud knock in the pipes, as if he hit something. He takes the plunger away and watches the drain. Suddenly, a large air bubble bursts out of the drain. He watches, but the water shows no sign of

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where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

imparted

How many times the word 'imparted' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

touch

How many times the word 'touch' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

once

How many times the word 'once' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

perfect

How many times the word 'perfect' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

saw

How many times the word 'saw' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

wink

How many times the word 'wink' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

gaudy

How many times the word 'gaudy' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

corduroy

How many times the word 'corduroy' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

assumed

How many times the word 'assumed' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

ever

How many times the word 'ever' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

slice

How many times the word 'slice' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

though

How many times the word 'though' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

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How many times the word 'delicate' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

husband

How many times the word 'husband' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

overpowered

How many times the word 'overpowered' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

laughter

How many times the word 'laughter' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

world

How many times the word 'world' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

foliage

How many times the word 'foliage' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

sadly

How many times the word 'sadly' appears in the text?

where I bought it. I wouldn't let her tell of course." She created fashions and was imitated as was the Head of the House of Coombe but she was enraptured by the fact and the entire power of such gray matter as was held by her small brain cells was concentrated upon her desire to evolve new fantasies and amazements for her world. Before he had been married for a year there began to creep into the mind of Bob Gareth-Lawless a fearsome doubt remotely hinting that she might end by becoming an awful bore in the course of time--particularly if she also ended by being less pretty. She chattered so incessantly about nothing and was such an empty-headed, extravagant little fool in her insistence on clothes--clothes--clothes--as if they were the breath of life. After watching her for about two hours one morning as she sat before her mirror directing her maid to arrange and re-arrange her hair in different styles--in delicate puffs and curls and straying rings--soft bands and loops--in braids and coils--he broke forth into an uneasy short laugh and expressed himself--though she did not know he was expressing himself and would not have understood him if she had. "If you have a soul--and I'm not at all certain you have--" he said, "it's divided into a dressmaker's and a hairdresser's and a milliner's shop. It's full of tumbled piles of hats and frocks and diamond combs. It's an awful mess, Feather." "I hope it's a shoe shop and a jeweller's as well," she laughed quite gaily. "And a lace-maker's. I need every one of them." "It's a rag shop," he said. "It has nothing but CHIFFONS in it." "If ever I DO think of souls I think of them as silly gauzy things floating about like little balloons," was her cheerful response. "That's an idea," he answered with a rather louder laugh. "Yours might be made of pink and blue gauze spangled with those things you call paillettes." The fancy attracted her. "If I had one like that"--with a pleased creative air, "it would look rather ducky floating from my shoulder--or even my hat--or my hair in the evenings, just held by a tiny sparkling chain fastened with a diamond pin--and with lovely little pink and blue streamers." With the touch of genius she had at once relegated it to its place in the scheme of her universe. And Robert laughed even louder than before. "You mustn't make me laugh," she said holding up her hand. "I am having my hair done to match that quakery thin pale mousey dress with the tiny poke bonnet--and I want to try my face too. I must look sweet and demure. You mustn't really laugh when you wear a dress and hat like that. You must only smile." Some months earlier Bob would have found it difficult to believe that she said this entirely without any touch of humour but he realized now that it was so said. He had some sense of humour of his own and one of his reasons for vaguely feeling that she might become a bore was that she had none whatever. It was at the garden party where she wore the thin quakery mousey dress and tiny poke bonnet that the Head of the House of Coombe first saw her. It was at the place of a fashionable artist who lived at Hampstead and had a garden and a few fine old trees. It had been Feather's special intention to strike this note of delicate dim colour. Every other woman was blue or pink or yellow or white or flowered and she in her filmy coolness of unusual hue stood out exquisitely among them. Other heads wore hats broad or curved or flopping, hers looked like a little nun's or an imaginary portrait of a delicious young great-grandmother. She was more arresting than any other female creature on the emerald sward or under the spreading trees. When Coombe's eyes first fell upon her he was talking to a group of people and he stopped speaking. Someone standing quite near him said afterwards that he had for a second or so become pale--almost as if he saw something which frightened him. "Who is that under the copper beech--being talked to by Harlow?" he inquired. Feather was in fact listening with a gentle air and with her eyelids down drooped to the exact line harmonious with the angelic little poke bonnet. "It is Mrs. Robert Gareth-Lawless--'Feather' we call her," he was answered. "Was there ever anything more artful than that startling little smoky dress? If it was flame colour one wouldn't see it as quickly." "One wouldn't look at it as long," said Coombe. "One is in danger of staring. And the little hat--or bonnet--which pokes and is fastened under her pink ear by a satin bow held by a loose pale bud! Will someone rescue me from staring by leading me to her. It won't be staring if I am talking to her. Please." The paleness appeared again as on being led across the grass he drew nearer to the copper beech. He was still rather pale when Feather lifted her eyes to him. Her eyes were so shaped by Nature that they looked like an angel's when they were lifted. There are eyes of that particular cut. But he had not talked to her fifteen minutes before he knew that there was no real reason why he should ever again lose his colour at the sight of her. He had thought at first there was. With the perception which invariably marked her sense of fitness of things she had begun in the course of the fifteen minutes--almost before the colour had quite returned to his face--the story of her husband's idea of her soul, as a balloon of pink and blue gauze spangled with paillettes. And of her own inspiration of wearing it floating from her shoulder or her hair by the light sparkling chain--and with delicate ribbon streamers. She was much delighted with his laugh--though she thought it had a rather cracked, harsh sound. She knew he was an important person and she always felt she was being a success when people laughed. "Exquisite!" he said. "I shall never see you in the future without it. But wouldn't it be necessary to vary the colour at times?" "Oh! Yes--to match things," seriously. "I couldn't wear a pink and blue one with this--" glancing over the smoky mousey thing "--or paillettes." "Oh, no--not paillettes," he agreed almost with gravity, the harsh laugh having ended. "One couldn't imagine the exact colour in a moment. One would have to think," she reflected. "Perhaps a misty dim bluey thing--like the edge of a rain-cloud--scarcely a colour at all." For an instant her eyes were softly shadowed as if looking into a dream. He watched her fixedly then. A woman who was a sort of angel might look like that when she was asking herself how much her pure soul might dare to pray for. Then he laughed again and Feather laughed also. Many practical thoughts had already begun to follow each other hastily through her mind. It would be the best possible thing for them if he really admired her. Bob was having all sorts of trouble with people they owed money to. Bills were sent in again and again and disagreeable letters were written. Her dressmaker and milliner had given her most rude hints which could indeed be scarcely considered hints at all. She scarcely dared speak to their smart young footman who she knew had only taken the place in the slice of a house because he had been told that it might be an opening to better things. She did not know the exact summing up at the agency had been as follows: "They're a good looking pair and he's Lord Lawdor's nephew. They're bound to have their fling and smart people will come to their house because she's so pretty. They'll last two or three years perhaps and you'll open the door to the kind of people who remember a well set-up young fellow if he shows he knows his work above the usual." The more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house the more likely the owners of it were to get good invitations and continued credit, Feather was aware. Besides which, she thought ingenuously, if he was rich he would no doubt lend Bob money. She had already known that certain men who liked her had done it. She did not mind it at all. One was obliged to have money. This was the beginning of an acquaintance which gave rise to much argument over tea-cups and at dinner parties and in boudoirs--even in corners of Feather's own gaudy little drawing-room. The argument regarded the degree of Coombe's interest in her. There was always curiosity as to the degree of his interest in any woman--especially and privately on the part of the woman herself. Casual and shallow observers said he was quite infatuated if such a thing were possible to a man of his temperament; the more concentrated of mind said it was not possible to a man of his temperament and that any attraction Feather might have for him was of a kind special to himself and that he alone could explain it--and he would not. Remained however the fact that he managed to see a great deal of her. It might be said that he even rather followed her about and more than one among the specially concentrated of mind had seen him on occasion stand apart a little and look at her--watch her--with an expression suggesting equally profound thought and the profound intention to betray his private meditations in no degree. There was no shadow of profundity of thought in his treatment of her. He talked to her as she best liked to be talked to about herself, her successes and her clothes which were more successful than anything else. He went to the little but exceedingly lively dinners the Gareth-Lawlesses gave and though he was understood not to be fond of dancing now and then danced with her at balls. Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her. Her idea of that universal emotion was that it was a matter of clothes and propinquity and loveliness and that if one were at all clever one got things one wanted as a result of it. Her overwhelming affection for Bob and his for her had given her life in London and its entertaining accompaniments. Her frankness in the matter of this desirable capture when she talked to her husband was at once light and friendly. "Of course you will be able to get credit at his tailor's as you know him so well," she said. "When I persuaded him to go with me to Madame Helene's last week she was quite amiable. He helped me to choose six dresses and I believe she would have let me choose six more." "Does she think he is going to pay for them?" asked Bob. "It doesn't matter what she thinks"; Feather laughed very prettily. "Doesn't it?" "Not a bit. I shall have the dresses. What's the matter, Rob? You look quite red and cross." "I've had a headache for three days," he answered, "and I feel hot and cross. I don't care about a lot of things you say, Feather." "Don't be silly," she retorted. "I don't care about a lot of things you say--and do, too, for the matter of that." Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. "There's a--sort of limit," he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily "--to the things one--SAYS." "That sounds like Alice," was her undisturbed answer. "She used to squabble at me because I SAID things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by SAYING things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know," she added practically. "Somehow he COUNTS. Don't you recollect how before we knew him--when he was abroad so long--people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn't help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him--about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude--and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I'm convinced he adores mine." She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things--they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes--carried them about with her--however beautifully. "I like him," she went on. "I don't know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don't understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn't really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him." The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse--who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman--carried her down to the kitchen and Servants' Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants' Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife's drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. "Feather!" he gasped. "Don't know what's up with me. I believe I'm--awfully ill! I can't see straight. Can't think." He fell over sidewise on to the cushions so helplessly that Feather sprang at him. "Don't, Rob, don't!" she cried in actual anguish. "Lord Coombe is taking us to the opera and to supper afterwards. I'm going to wear--" She stopped speaking to shake him and try to lift his head. "Oh! do try to sit up," she begged pathetically. "Just try. DON'T give up till afterwards." But she could neither make him sit up nor make him hear. He lay back heavily with his mouth open, breathing stertorously and quite insensible. It happened that the Head of the House of Coombe was announced at that very moment even as she stood wringing her hands over the sofa. He went to her side and looked at Gareth-Lawless. "Have you sent for a doctor?" he inquired. "He's--only just done it!" she exclaimed. "It's more than I can bear. You said the Prince would be at the supper after the opera and--" "Were you thinking of going?" he put it to her quietly. "I shall have to send for a nurse of course--" she began. He went so far as to interrupt her. "You had better not go--if you'll pardon my saying so," he suggested. "Not go? Not go at all?" she wailed. "Not go at all," was his answer. And there was such entire lack of encouragement in it that Feather sat down and burst into sobs. In few than two weeks Robert was dead and she was left a lovely penniless widow with a child. CHAPTER III Two or three decades earlier the prevailing sentiment would have been that "poor little Mrs. Gareth-Lawless" and her situation were pathetic. Her acquaintances would sympathetically have discussed her helplessness and absolute lack of all resource. So very pretty, so young, the mother of a dear little girl--left with no income! How very sad! What COULD she do? The elect would have paid her visits and sitting in her darkened drawing-room earnestly besought her to trust to her Maker and suggested "the Scriptures" as suitable reading. Some of them--rare and strange souls even in their time--would have known what they meant and meant what they said in a way they had as yet only the power to express through the medium of a certain shibboleth, the rest would have used the same forms merely because shibboleth is easy and always safe and creditable. But to Feather's immediate circle a multiplicity of engagements, fevers of eagerness in the attainment of pleasures and ambitions, anxieties, small and large terrors, and a whirl of days left no time for the regarding of pathetic aspects. The tiny house up whose staircase--tucked against a wall--one had seemed to have the effect of crowding even when one went alone to make a call, suddenly ceased to represent hilarious little parties which were as entertaining as they were up to date and noisy. The most daring things London gossiped about had been said and done and worn there. Novel social ventures had been tried--dancing and songs which seemed almost startling at first--but which were gradually being generally adopted. There had always been a great deal of laughing and talking of nonsense and the bandying of jokes and catch phrases. And Feather fluttering about and saying delicious, silly things at which her hearers shouted with glee. Such a place could not suddenly become pathetic. It seemed almost indecent for Robert Gareth-Lawless to have dragged Death nakedly into their midst--to have died in his bed in one of the little bedrooms, to have been put in his coffin and carried down the stairs scraping the wall, and sent away in a hearse. Nobody could bear to think of it. Feather could bear it less than anybody else. It seemed incredible that such a trick could have been played her. She shut herself up in her stuffy little bedroom with its shrimp pink frills and draperies and cried lamentably. At first she cried as a child might who was suddenly snatched away in the midst of a party. Then she began to cry because she was frightened. Numbers of cards "with sympathy" had been left at the front door during the first week after the funeral, they had accumulated in a pile on the salver but very few people had really come to see her and while she knew they had the excuse of her recent bereavement she felt that it made the house ghastly. It had never been silent and empty. Things had always been going on and now there was actually not a sound to be heard--no one going up and down stairs--Rob's room cleared of all his belongings and left orderly and empty--the drawing-room like a gay little tomb without an occupant. How long WOULD it be before it would be full of people again--how long must she wait before she could decently invite anyone?--It was really at this point that fright seized upon her. Her brain was not given to activities of reasoning and followed no thought far. She had not begun to ask herself questions as to ways and means. Rob had been winning at cards and had borrowed some money from a new acquaintance so no immediate abyss had yawned at her feet. But when the thought of future festivities rose before her a sudden check made her involuntarily clutch at her throat. She had no money at all, bills were piled everywhere, perhaps now Robert was dead none of the shops would give her credit. She remembered hearing Rob come into the house swearing only the day before he was taken ill and it had been because he had met on the door-step a collector of the rent which was long over-due and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants' wages, none to pay the household bills, none to pay for the monthly hire of the brougham! Would they turn her into the street--would the servants go away--would she be left without even a carriage? What could she do about clothes! She could not wear anything but mourning now and by the time she was out of mourning her old clothes would have gone out of fashion. The morning on which this aspect of things occurred to her, she was so terrified that she began to run up and down the room like a frightened little cat seeing no escape from the trap it is caught in. "It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" broke out between her sobs. "What can I do? I can't do anything! There's nothing to do! It's awful--it's awful--it's awful!" She ended by throwing herself on the bed crying until she was exhausted. She had no mental resources which would suggest to her that there was anything but crying to be done. She had cried very little in her life previously because even in her days of limitation she had been able to get more or less what she wanted--though of course it had generally been less. And crying made one's nose and eyes red. On this occasion she actually forgot her nose and eyes and cried until she scarcely knew herself when she got up and looked in the glass. She rang the bell for her maid and sat down to wait her coming. Tonson should bring her a cup of beef tea. "It's time for lunch," she thought. "I'm faint with crying. And she shall bathe my eyes with rose-water." It was not Tonson's custom to keep her mistress waiting but today she was not prompt. Feather rang a second time and an impatient third and then sat in her chair and waited until she began to feel as she felt always in these dreadful days the dead silence of the house. It was the thing which most struck terror to her soul--that horrid stillness. The servants whose place was in the basement were too much closed in their gloomy little quarters to have made themselves heard upstairs even if they had been inclined to. During the last few weeks Feather had even found herself wishing that they were less well trained and would make a little noise--do anything to break the silence. The room she sat in--Rob's awful little room adjoining--which was awful because of what she had seen for a moment lying stiff and hard on the bed before she was taken away in hysterics--were dread enclosures of utter silence. The whole house was dumb--the very street had no sound in it. She could not endure it. How dare Tonson? She sprang up and rang the bell again and again until its sound came back to her pealing through the place. Then she waited again. It seemed to her that five minutes passed before she heard the smart young footman mounting the stairs slowly. She did not wait for his knock upon the door but opened it herself. "How dare Tonson!" she began. "I have rung four or five times! How dare she!" The smart young footman's manner had been formed in a good school. It was attentive, impersonal. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered. "What do you mean? What does SHE mean? Where is she?" Feather felt almost breathless before his unperturbed good style. "I don't know, ma'am," he answered as before. Then with the same unbiassed bearing added, "None of us know. She has gone away." Feather clutched the door handle because she felt herself swaying. "Away! Away!" the words were a faint gasp. "She packed her trunk yesterday and carried it away with her on a four-wheeler. About an hour ago, ma'am." Feather dropped her hand from the knob of the door and trailed back to the chair she had left, sinking into it helplessly. "Who--who will dress me?" she half wailed. "I don't know, ma'am," replied the young footman, his excellent manner presuming no suggestion or opinion whatever. He added however, "Cook, ma'am, wishes to speak to you." "Tell her to come to me here," Feather said. "And I--I want a cup of beef tea." "Yes, ma'am," with entire respect. And the door closed quietly behind him. It was not long before it was opened again. "Cook" had knocked and Feather had told her to come in. Most cooks are stout, but this one was not. She was a thin, tall woman with square shoulders and a square face somewhat reddened by constant proximity to fires. She had been trained at a cooking school. She carried a pile of small account books but she brought nothing else. "I wanted some beef tea, Cook," said Feather protestingly. "There is no beef tea, ma'am," said Cook. "There is neither beef, nor stock, nor Liebig in the house." "Why--why not?" stammered Feather and she stammered because even her lack of perception saw something in the woman's face which was new to her. It was a sort of finality. She held out the pile of small books. "Here are the books, ma'am," was her explanation. "Perhaps as you don't like to be troubled with such things, you don't know how far behind they are. Nothing has been paid for months. It's been an every-day fight to get the things that was wanted. It's not an agreeable thing for a cook to have to struggle and plead. I've had to do it because I had my reputation to think of and I couldn't send up rubbish when there was company." Feather felt herself growing pale as she sat and stared at her. Cook drew near and laid one little book after another on the small table near her. "That's the butcher's book," she said. "He's sent nothing in for three days. We've been living on leavings. He's sent his last, he says and he means it. This is the baker's. He's not been for a week. I made up rolls because I had some flour left. It's done now--and HE'S done. This is groceries and Mercom & Fees wrote to Mr. Gareth-Lawless when the last month's supply came, that it would BE the last until payment was made. This is wines--and coal and wood--and laundry--and milk. And here is wages, ma'am, which CAN'T go on any longer." Feather threw up her hands and quite wildly. "Oh, go away!--go away!" she cried. "If Mr. Lawless were here--" "He isn't, ma'am," Cook interposed, not fiercely but in a way more terrifying than any ferocity could have been--a way which pointed steadily to the end of things. "As long as there's a gentleman in a house there's generally a sort of a prospect that things MAY be settled some way. At any rate there's someone to go and speak your mind to even if you have to give up your place. But when there's no gentleman and nothing--and nobody--respectable people with their livings to make have got to protect themselves." The woman had no intention of being insolent. Her simple statement that her employer's death had left "Nothing" and "Nobody" was prompted by no consciously ironic realization of the diaphanousness of Feather. As for the rest she had been professionally trained to take care of her interests as well as to cook and the ethics of the days of her grandmother when there had been servants with actual affections had not reached her. "Oh! go away! Go AWA-AY!" Feather almost shrieked. "I am going, ma'am. So are Edward and Emma and Louisa. It's no use waiting and giving the month's notice. We shouldn't save the month's wages and the trades-people wouldn't feed us. We can't stay here and starve. And it's a time of the year when places has to be looked for. You can't hold it against us, ma'am. It's better for you to have us out of the house tonight--which is when our boxes will be taken away." Then was Feather seized with a panic. For the first time in her life she found herself facing mere common facts which rose before her like a solid wall of stone--not to be leapt, or crept under, or bored through, or slipped round. She was so overthrown and bewildered that she could not even think of any clever and rapidly constructed lie which would help her; indeed she was so aghast that she did not remember that there were such things as lies. "Do you mean," she cried out, "that you are all going to LEAVE the house--that there won't be any servants to wait on me--that there's nothing to eat or drink--that I shall have to stay here ALONE--and starve!" "We should have to starve if we stayed," answered Cook simply. "And of course there are a few things left in the pantry and closets. And you might get in a woman by the day. You won't starve, ma'am. You've got your family in Jersey. We waited because we thought Mr. and Mrs. Darrel would be sure to come." "My father is ill. I think he's dying. My mother could not leave him for a moment. Perhaps he's dead now," Feather wailed. "You've got your London friends, ma'am--" Feather literally beat her hands together. "My friends! Can I go to people's houses and knock at their front door and tell them I haven't any servants or anything to eat! Can I do that? Can I?" And she said it as if she were going crazy. The woman had said what she had come to say as spokeswoman for

understand

How many times the word 'understand' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

who

How many times the word 'who' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

loose

How many times the word 'loose' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

interpreter

How many times the word 'interpreter' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

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How many times the word 'written' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

ladies

How many times the word 'ladies' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

garden

How many times the word 'garden' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

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How many times the word 'new' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

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which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

as

How many times the word 'as' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

lazy

How many times the word 'lazy' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

everybody

How many times the word 'everybody' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

mixing

How many times the word 'mixing' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

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How many times the word 'disappeared' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

then

How many times the word 'then' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

brushes

How many times the word 'brushes' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

dogs

How many times the word 'dogs' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

eastern

How many times the word 'eastern' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

sudden

How many times the word 'sudden' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

collection

How many times the word 'collection' appears in the text?

which I sold for you at Birmingham. Where are they?" "I have got them here," replied Magdalen. "What can you possibly mean by wanting them now?" "Bring them instantly into my dressing-room--the whole collection, brushes, palette, and everything. Don't waste time in asking questions; I'll tell you what has happened as we go on. Every moment is precious to us. Follow me instantly!" His face plainly showed that there was a serious reason for his strange proposal. Magdalen secured her collection of cosmetics and followed him into the dressing-room. He locked the door, placed her on a chair close to the light, and then told her what had happened. "We are on the brink of detection," proceeded the captain, carefully mixing his colors with liquid glue, and with a strong "drier" added from a bottle in his own possession. "There is only one chance for us (lift up your hair from the left side of your neck)--I have told Mr. Noel Vanstone to take a private opportunity of looking at you; and I am going to give the lie direct to that she-devil Lecount by painting out your moles." "They can't be painted out," said Magdalen. "No color will stop on them." "_My_ color will," remarked Captain Wragge. "I have tried a variety of professions in my time--the profession of painting among the rest. Did you ever hear of such a thing as a Black Eye? I lived some months once in the neighborhood of Drury Lane entirely on Black Eyes. My flesh-color stood on bruises of all sorts, shades, and sizes, and it will stand, I promise you, on your moles." With this assurance, the captain dipped his brush into a little lump of opaque color which he had mixed in a saucer, and which he had graduated as nearly as the materials would permit to the color of Magdalen's skin. After first passing a cambric handkerchief, with some white powder on it, over the part of her neck on which he designed to operate, he placed two layers of color on the moles with the tip of the brush. The process was performed in a few moments, and the moles, as if by magic, disappeared from view. Nothing but the closest inspection could have discovered the artifice by which they had been concealed; at the distance of two or three feet only, it was perfectly invisible. "Wait here five minutes," said Captain Wragge, "to let the paint dry--and then join us in the parlor. Mrs. Lecount herself would be puzzled if she looked at you now." "Stop!" said Magdalen. "There is one thing you have not told me yet. How did Mrs. Lecount get the description which you read downstairs? Whatever else she has seen of me, she has not seen the mark on my neck--it is too far back, and too high up; my hair hides it." "Who knows of the mark?" asked Captain Wragge. She turned deadly pale under the anguish of a sudden recollection of Frank. "My sister knows it," she said, faintly. "Mrs. Lecount may have written to your sister," suggested the captain: "Do you think my sister would tell a stranger what no stranger has a right to know? Never! never!" "Is there nobody else who could tell Mrs. Lecount? The mark was mentioned in the handbills at York. Who put it there?" "Not Norah! Perhaps Mr. Pendril. Perhaps Miss Garth." "Then Mrs. Lecount has written to Mr. Pendril or Miss Garth--more likely to Miss Garth. The governess would be easier to deal with than the lawyer." "What can she have said to Miss Garth?" Captain Wragge considered a little. "I can't say what Mrs. Lecount may have written," he said, "but I can tell you what I should have written in Mrs. Lecount's place. I should have frightened Miss Garth by false reports about you, to begin with, and then I should have asked for personal particulars, to help a benevolent stranger in restoring you to your friends." The angry glitter flashed up instantly in Magdalen's eyes. "What _you_ would have done is what Mrs. Lecount has done," she said, indignantly. "Neither lawyer nor governess shall dispute my right to my own will and my own way. If Miss Garth thinks she can control my actions by corresponding with Mrs. Lecount, I will show Miss Garth she is mistaken! It is high time, Captain Wragge, to have done with these wretched risks of discovery. We will take the short way to the end we have in view sooner than Mrs. Lecount or Miss Garth think for. How long can you give me to wring an offer of marriage out of that creature downstairs?" "I dare not give you long," replied Captain Wragge. "Now your friends know where you are, they may come down on us at a day's notice. Could you manage it in a week?" "I'll manage it in half the time," she said, with a hard, defiant laugh. "Leave us together this morning as you left us at Dunwich, and take Mrs. Wragge with you, as an excuse for parting company. Is the paint dry yet? Go downstairs and tell him I am coming directly." So, for the second time, Miss Garth's well-meant efforts defeated their own end. So the fatal force of circumstance turned the hand that would fain have held Magdalen back into the hand that drove her on. The captain returned to his visitor in the parlor, after first stopping on his way to issue his orders for the walking excursion to Mrs. Wragge. "I am shocked to have kept you waiting," he said, sitting down again confidentially by Noel Vanstone's side. "My only excuse is, that my niece had accidentally dressed her hair so as to defeat our object. I have been persuading her to alter it, and young ladies are apt to be a little obstinate on questions relating to their toilet. Give her a chair on that side of you when she comes in, and take your look at her neck comfortably before we start for our walk." Magdalen entered the room as he said those words, and after the first greetings were exchanged, took the chair presented to her with the most unsuspicious readiness. Noel Vanstone applied the Crucial Test on the spot, with the highest appreciation of the fair material which was the subject of experiment. Not the vestige of a mole was visible on any part of the smooth white surface of Miss Bygrave's neck. It mutely answered the blinking inquiry of Noel Vanstone's half-closed eyes by the flattest practical contradiction of Mrs. Lecount. That one central incident in the events of the morning was of all the incidents that had hitherto occurred, the most important in its results. That one discovery shook the housekeeper's hold on her master as nothing had shaken it yet. In a few minutes Mrs. Wragge made her appearance, and excited as much surprise in Noel Vanstone's mind as he was capable of feeling while absorbed in the enjoyment of Magdalen's society. The walking-party left the house at once, directing their steps northward, so as not to pass the windows of Sea-view Cottage. To Mrs. Wragge's unutterable astonishment, her husband, for the first time in the course of their married life, politely offered her his arm, and led her on in advance of the young people, as if the privilege of walking alone with her presented some special attraction to him! "Step out!" whispered the captain, fiercely. "Leave your niece and Mr. Vanstone alone! If I catch you looking back at them, I'll put the Oriental Cashmere Robe on the top of the kitchen fire! Turn your toes out, and keep step--confound you, keep step!" Mrs. Wragge kept step to the best of her limited ability. Her sturdy knees trembled under her. She firmly believed the captain was intoxicated. The walk lasted for rather more than an hour. Before nine o'clock they were all back again at North Shingles. The ladies went at once into the house. Noel Vanstone remained with Captain Wragge in the garden. "Well," said the captain, "what do you think now of Mrs. Lecount?" "Damn Lecount!" replied Noel Vanstone, in great agitation. "I'm half inclined to agree with you. I'm half inclined to think my infernal housekeeper is mad." He spoke fretfully and unwillingly, as if the merest allusion to Mrs. Lecount was distasteful to him. His color came and went; his manner was absent and undecided; he fidgeted restlessly about the garden walk. It would have been plain to a far less acute observation than Captain Wragge's, that Magdalen had met his advances by an unexpected grace and readiness of encouragement which had entirely overthrown his self-control. "I never enjoyed a walk so much in my life!" he exclaimed, with a sudden outburst of enthusiasm. "I hope Miss Bygrave feels all the better, for it. Do you go out at the same time to-morrow morning? May I join you again?" "By all means, Mr. Vanstone," said the Captain, cordially. "Excuse me for returning to the subject--but what do you propose saying to Mrs. Lecount?" "I don't know. Lecount is a perfect nuisance! What would you do, Mr. Bygrave, if you were in my place?" "Allow me to ask a question, my dear sir, before I tell you. What is your breakfast-hour?" "Half-past nine." "Is Mrs. Lecount an early riser?" "No. Lecount is lazy in the morning. I hate lazy women! If you were in my place, what should you say to her?" "I should say nothing," replied Captain Wragge. "I should return at once by the back way; I should let Mrs. Lecount see me in the front garden as if I was taking a turn before breakfast; and I should leave her to suppose that I was only just out of my room. If she asks you whether you mean to come here today, say No. Secure a quiet life until circumstances force you to give her an answer. Then tell the plain truth--say that Mr. Bygrave's niece and Mrs. Lecount's description are at variance with each other in the most important particular, and beg that the subject may not be mentioned again. There is my advice. What do you think of it?" If Noel Vanstone could have looked into his counselor's mind, he might have thought the captain's advice excellently adapted to serve the captain's interests. As long as Mrs. Lecount could be kept in ignorance of her master's visits to North Shingles, so long she would wait until the opportunity came for trying her experiment, and so long she might be trusted not to endanger the conspiracy by any further proceedings. Necessarily incapable of viewing Captain Wragge's advice under this aspect, Noel Vanstone simply looked at it as offering him a temporary means of escape from an explanation with his housekeeper. He eagerly declared that the course of action suggested to him should be followed to the letter, and returned to Sea View without further delay. On this occasion Captain Wragge's anticipations were in no respect falsified by Mrs. Lecount's conduct. She had no suspicion of her master's visit to North Shingles: she had made up her mind, if necessary, to wait patiently for his interview with Miss Bygrave until the end of the week; and she did not embarrass him by any unexpected questions when he announced his intention of holding no personal communication with the Bygraves on that day. All she said was, "Don't you feel well enough, Mr. Noel? or don't you feel inclined?" He answered, shortly, "I don't feel well enough"; and there the conversation ended. The next day the proceedings of the previous morning were exactly repeated. This time Noel Vanstone went home rapturously with a keepsake in his breast-pocket; he had taken tender possession of one of Miss Bygrave's gloves. At intervals during the day, whenever he was alone, he took out the glove and kissed it with a devotion which was almost passionate in its fervor. The miserable little creature luxuriated in his moments of stolen happiness with a speechless and stealthy delight which was a new sensation to him. The few young girls whom he had met with, in his father's narrow circle at Zurich, had felt a mischievous pleasure in treating him like a quaint little plaything; the strongest impression he could make on their hearts was an impression in which their lap-dogs might have rivaled him; the deepest interest he could create in them was the interest they might have felt in a new trinket or a new dress. The only women who had hitherto invited his admiration, and taken his compliments seriously had been women whose charms were on the wane, and whose chances of marriage were fast failing them. For the first time in his life he had now passed hours of happiness in the society of a beautiful girl, who had left him to think of her afterward without a single humiliating remembrance to lower him in his own esteem. Anxiously as he tried to hide it, the change produced in his look and manner by the new feeling awakened in him was not a change which could be concealed from Mrs. Lecount. On the second day she pointedly asked him whether he had not made an arrangement to call on the Bygraves. He denied it as before. "Perhaps you are going to-morrow, Mr. Noel?" persisted the housekeeper. He was at the end of his resources; he was impatient to be rid of her inquiries; he trusted to his friend at North Shingles to help him; and this time he answered Yes. "If you see the young lady," proceeded Mrs. Lecount, "don't forget that note of mine, sir, which you have in your waistcoat-pocket." No more was said on either side, but by that night's post the housekeeper wrote to Miss Garth. The letter merely acknowledged, with thanks, the receipt of Miss Garth's communication, and informed her that in a few days Mrs. Lecount hoped to be in a position to write again and summon Mr. Pendril to Aldborough. Late in the evening, when the parlor at North Shingles began to get dark, and when the captain rang the bell for candles as usual, he was surprised by hearing Magdalen's voice in the passage telling the servant to take the lights downstairs again. She knocked at the door immediately afterward, and glided into the obscurity of the room like a ghost. "I have a question to ask you about your plans for to-morrow," she said. "My eyes are very weak this evening, and I hope you will not object to dispense with the candles for a few minutes." She spoke in low, stifled tones, and felt her way noiselessly to a chair far removed from the captain in the darkest part of the room. Sitting near the window, he could just discern the dim outline of her dress, he could just hear the faint accents of her voice. For the last two days he had seen nothing of her except during their morning walk. On that afternoon he had found his wife crying in the little backroom down-stairs. She could only tell him that Magdalen had frightened her--that Magdalen was going the way again which she had gone when the letter came from China in the terrible past time at Vauxhall Walk. "I was sorry to her that you were ill to-day, from Mrs. Wragge," said the captain, unconsciously dropping his voice almost to a whisper as he spoke. "It doesn't matter," she answered quietly, out of the darkness. "I am strong enough to suffer, and live. Other girls in my place would have been happier--they would have suffered, and died. It doesn't matter; it will be all the same a hundred years hence. Is he coming again tomorrow morning at seven o'clock?" "He is coming, if you feel no objection to it." "I have no objection to make; I have done with objecting. But I should like to have the time altered. I don't look my best in the early morning---I have bad nights, and I rise haggard and worn. Write him a note this evening, and tell him to come at twelve o'clock." "Twelve is rather late, under the circumstances, for you to be seen out walking." "I have no intention of walking. Let him be shown into the parlor--" Her voice died away in silence before she ended the sentence. "Yes?" said Captain Wragge. "And leave me alone in the parlor to receive him." "I understand," said the captain. "An admirable idea. I'll be out of the way in the dining-room while he is here, and you can come and tell me about it when he has gone." There was another moment of silence. "Is there no way but telling you?" she asked, suddenly. "I can control myself while he is with me, but I can't answer for what I may say or do afterward. Is there no other way?" "Plenty of ways," said the captain. "Here is the first that occurs to me. Leave the blind down over the window of your room upstairs before he comes. I will go out on the beach, and wait there within sight of the house. When I see him come out again, I will look at the window. If he has said nothing, leave the blind down. If he has made you an offer, draw the blind up. The signal is simplicity itself; we can't misunderstand each other. Look your best to-morrow! Make sure of him, my dear girl--make sure of him, if you possibly can." He had spoken loud enough to feel certain that she had heard him, but no answering word came from her. The dead silence was only disturbed by the rustling of her dress, which told him she had risen from her chair. Her shadowy presence crossed the room again; the door shut softly; she was gone. He rang the bell hurriedly for the lights. The servant found him standing close at the window, looking less self-possessed than usual. He told her he felt a little poorly, and sent her to the cupboard for the brandy. At a few minutes before twelve the next day Captain Wragge withdrew to his post of observation, concealing himself behind a fishing-boat drawn up on the beach. Punctually as the hour struck, he saw Noel Vanstone approach North Shingles and open the garden gate. When the house door had closed on the visitor, Captain Wragge settled himself comfortably against the side of the boat and lit his cigar. He smoked for half an hour--for ten minutes over the half-hour, by his watch. He finished the cigar down to the last morsel of it that he could hold in his lips. Just as he had thrown away the end, the door opened again and Noel Vanstone came out. The captain looked up instantly at Magdalen's window. In the absorbing excitement of the moment, he counted the seconds. She might get from the parlor to her own room in less than a minute. He counted to thirty, and nothing happened. He counted to fifty, and nothing happened. He gave up counting, and left the boat impatiently, to return to the house. As he took his first step forward he saw the signal. The blind was drawn up. Cautiously ascending the eminence of the beach, Captain Wragge looked toward Sea-view Cottage before he showed himself on the Parade. Noel Vanstone had reached home again; he was just entering his own door. "If all your money was offered me to stand in your shoes," said the captain, looking after him--"rich as you are, I wouldn't take it!" CHAPTER VIII. ON returning to the house, Captain Wragge received a significant message from the servant. "Mr. Noel Vanstone would call again at two o'clock that afternoon, when he hoped to have the pleasure of finding Mr. Bygrave at home." The captain's first inquiry after hearing this message referred to Magdalen. "Where was Miss Bygrave?" "In her own room." "Where was Mrs. Bygrave?" "In the back parlor." Captain Wragge turned his steps at once in the latter direction, and found his wife, for the second time, in tears. She had been sent out of Magdalen's room for the whole day, and she was at her wits' end to know what she had done to deserve it. Shortening her lamentations without ceremony, her husband sent her upstairs on the spot, with instructions to knock at the door, and to inquire whether Magdalen could give five minutes' attention to a question of importance which must be settled before two o'clock. The answer returned was in the negative. Magdalen requested that the subject on which she was asked to decide might be mentioned to her in writing. She engaged to reply in the same way, on the understanding that Mrs. Wragge, and not the servant, should be employed to deliver the note and to take back the answer. Captain Wragge forthwith opened his paper-case and wrote these lines: "Accept my warmest congratulations on the result of your interview with Mr. N. V. He is coming again at two o'clock--no doubt to make his proposals in due form. The question to decide is, whether I shall press him or not on the subject of settlements. The considerations for your own mind are two in number. First, whether the said pressure (without at all underrating your influence over him) may not squeeze for a long time before it squeezes money out of Mr. N. V. Secondly, whether we are altogether justified--considering our present position toward a certain sharp practitioner in petticoats--in running the risk of delay. Consider these points, and let me have your decision as soon as convenient." The answer returned to this note was written in crooked, blotted characters, strangely unlike Magdalen's usually firm and clear handwriting. It only contained these words: "Give yourself no trouble about settlements. Leave the use to which he is to put his money for the future in my hands." "Did you see her?" asked the captain, when his wife had delivered the answer. "I tried," said Mrs. Wragge, with a fresh burst of tears--"but she only opened the door far enough to put out her hand. I took and gave it a little squeeze--and, oh poor soul, it felt so cold in mine!" When Mrs. Lecount's master made his appearance at two o'clock, he stood alarmingly in need of an anodyne application from Mrs. Lecount's green fan. The agitation of making his avowal to Magdalen; the terror of finding himself discovered by the housekeeper; the tormenting suspicion of the hard pecuniary conditions which Magdalen's relative and guardian might impose on him--all these emotions, stirring in conflict together, had overpowered his feebly-working heart with a trial that strained it sorely. He gasped for breath as he sat down in the parlor at North Shingles, and that ominous bluish pallor which always overspread his face in moments of agitation now made its warning appearance again. Captain Wragge seized the brandy bottle in genuine alarm, and forced his visitor to drink a wine-glassful of the spirit before a word was said between them on either side. Restored by the stimulant, and encouraged by the readiness with which the captain anticipated everything that he had to say, Noel Vanstone contrived to state the serious object of his visit in tolerably plain terms. All the conventional preliminaries proper to the occasion were easily disposed of. The suitor's family was respectable; his position in life was undeniably satisfactory; his attachment, though hasty, was evidently disinterested and sincere. All that Captain Wragge had to do was to refer to these various considerations with a happy choice of language in a voice that trembled with manly emotion, and this he did to perfection. For the first half-hour of the interview, no allusion whatever was made to the delicate and dangerous part of the subject. The captain waited until he had composed his visitor, and when that result was achieved came smoothly to the point in these terms: "There is one little difficulty, Mr. Vanstone, which I think we have both overlooked. Your housekeeper's recent conduct inclines me to fear that she will view the approaching change in your life with anything but a friendly eye. Probably you have not thought it necessary yet to inform her of the new tie which you propose to form?" Noel Vanstone turned pale at the bare idea of explaining himself to Mrs. Lecount. "I can't tell what I'm to do," he said, glancing aside nervously at the window, as if he expected to see the housekeeper peeping in. "I hate all awkward positions, and this is the most unpleasant position I ever was placed in. You don't know what a terrible woman Lecount is. I'm not afraid of her; pray don't suppose I'm afraid of her--" At those words his fears rose in his throat, and gave him the lie direct by stopping his utterance. "Pray don't trouble yourself to explain," said Captain Wragge, coming to the rescue. "This is the common story, Mr. Vanstone. Here is a woman who has grown old in your service, and in your father's service before you; a woman who has contrived, in all sorts of small, underhand ways, to presume systematically on her position for years and years past; a woman, in short, whom your inconsiderate but perfectly natural kindness has allowed to claim a right of property in you--" "Property!" cried Noel Vanstone, mistaking the captain, and letting the truth escape him through sheer inability to conceal his fears any longer. "I don't know what amount of property she won't claim. She'll make me pay for my father as well as for myself. Thousands, Mr. Bygrave--thousands of pounds sterling out of my pocket!!!" He clasped his hands in despair at the picture of pecuniary compulsion which his fancy had conjured up--his own golden life-blood spouting from him in great jets of prodigality, under the lancet of Mrs. Lecount. "Gently, Mr. Vanstone--gently! The woman knows nothing so far, and the money is not gone yet." "No, no; the money is not gone, as you say. I'm only nervous about it; I can't help being nervous. You were saying something just now; you were going to give me advice. I value your advice; you don't know how highly I value your advice." He said those words with a conciliatory smile which was more than helpless; it was absolutely servile in its dependence on his judicious friend. "I was only assuring you, my dear sir, that I understood your position," said the captain. "I see your difficulty as plainly as you can see it yourself. Tell a woman like Mrs. Lecount that she must come off her domestic throne, to make way for a young and beautiful successor, armed with the authority of a wife, and an unpleasant scene must be the inevitable result. An unpleasant scene, Mr. Vanstone, if your opinion of your housekeeper's sanity is well founded. Something far more serious, if my opinion that her intellect is unsettled happens to turn out the right one." "I don't say it isn't my opinion, too," rejoined Noel Vanstone. "Especially after what has happened to-day." Captain Wragge immediately begged to know what the event alluded to might be. Noel Vanstone thereupon explained--with an infinite number of parentheses all referring to himself--that Mrs. Lecount had put the dreaded question relating to the little note in her master's pocket barely an hour since. He had answered her inquiry as Mr. Bygrave had advised him. On hearing that the accuracy of the personal description had been fairly put to the test, and had failed in the one important particular of the moles on the neck, Mrs. Lecount had considered a little, and had then asked him whether he had shown her note to Mr. Bygrave before the experiment was tried. He had answered in the negative, as the only safe form of reply that he could think of on the spur of the moment, and the housekeeper had then addressed him in these strange and startling words: "You are keeping the truth from me, Mr. Noel. You are trusting strangers, and doubting your old servant and your old friend. Every time you go to Mr. Bygrave's house, every time you see Miss Bygrave, you are drawing nearer and nearer to your destruction. They have got the bandage over your eyes in spite of me; but I tell them, and tell you, before many days are over I will take it off!" To this extraordinary outbreak--accompanied as it was by an expression in Mrs. Lecount's face which he had never seen there before--Noel Vanstone had made no reply. Mr. Bygrave's conviction that there was a lurking taint of insanity in the housekeeper's blood had recurred to his memory, and he had left the room at the first opportunity. Captain Wragge listened with the closest attention to the narrative thus presented to him. But one conclusion could be drawn from it--it was a plain warning to him to hasten the end. "I am not surprised," he said, gravely, "to hear that you are inclining more favorably to my opinion. After what you have just told me, Mr. Vanstone, no sensible man could do otherwise. This is becoming serious. I hardly know what results may not be expected to follow the communication of your approaching change in life to Mrs. Lecount. My niece may be involved in those results. She is nervous; she is sensitive in the highest degree; she is the innocent object of this woman's unreasoning hatred and distrust. You alarm me, sir! I am not easily thrown off my balance, but I acknowledge you alarm me for the future." He frowned, shook his head, and looked at his visitor despondently. Noel Vanstone began to feel uneasy. The change in Mr. Bygrave's manner seemed ominous of a reconsideration of

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