Read "The Stronger Influence" by Ethel Mills online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
That night Esme lay wakeful in the darkness with a brain too active for sleep, courting slumber, which refused to come to her aid, physically tired, yet not overtired, and mentally very clear and wide awake.
Outside her window the crickets were chirruping noisily, and in the warm darkness, which pressed about her as she lay wide-eyed and very still in her narrow white bed, the mosquitoes hummed annoyingly close to her ears. The sounds of people moving in the rooms adjoining hers had ceased long since; the night was quiet, with the listening hush which settles upon a place when the activities of the day are ended and people sleep. It seemed to Esme that she alone of all the household was awake.