"She's that bad again. Can't sleep and off her food. Ain't had hardly anything all day or yes'day. Just sits 'fore th' fire and mopes from morn'n till night. 'Taint natural for sure, for him 'at's gone weren't one to cry for, that's cert'n.... No, she don't complain of any pain or anything. Just sits and mopes and cries on the quiet 's if her heart was broke. Sure she'd more cause to cry before he was took than what she has now."

When he entered the room he did not at first see her, so sunk down was she in the depths of the great ear-flapped chair.

She made no attempt to rise and greet him. When he stood beside her and quietly expressed his regret at finding her no better, she covered her face with her hands and sobbed convulsively.

She looked little more than a girl, slight and frail and forlorn, as she crouched there with hidden face, and he was truly sorry for her.

It was impossible for him to keep the sympathy he felt entirely out of his voice.

"What can I do for you, Mrs Carew?" he asked quietly, and the forlorn figure shook again but made no response.

"You are doing yourself harm with all this," he said gently again.

"And there is really no occasion for it, that I can see."

Her silent extremity of grief--her utter discomfiture was pitiful to look upon. It touched him profoundly, for he penetrated the meaning of it. She was overwhelmed with the knowledge of the sacrifice he had made for her--and with pity for herself.

All he could do was to wait quietly till the feeling, roused afresh by his presence, had spent itself.

"Oh, I did not know," she whispered at last, through the shielding hands. "I did not know you would do that.... You have ruined yourself.... You should have let them hang me."

And there and then, on the spur of the moment, he leaped up a height which he had not even sighted a second before.

He had, by the sacrifice of his prospects, saved her from the legal consequences of her act. That was irrevocably past and done with, and he must pay the price. But she was paying a double due--remorse for what she herself had done, bitter sorrow at the ruinous price he had paid for her safety.

He had saved her life. Why not save her the rest?--her peace of mind, all her possibilities of future happiness.

In any case it would make no difference to him. For her it might mean all the difference between darkness and light for the rest of her life.

And she looked pitifully helpless and hopeless as she lay there sobbing convulsively in the big chair.

He saw the possibility in a flash and gripped it.

"Hang you? Why on earth should anyone want to hang you?" he asked, with all the natural surprise he could put into it.

"You know,"--in a scared whisper. "Because I got him the poison----"

"Come, come now! Let us have no more of that. I was hoping a good night's rest would have ridded you of that bad dream."

"Dream?" and she looked up at him wildly. "Ah, if I could only believe it was a dream!" and she shook her head forlornly.

"Why, of course it was a dream. You were over-wrought with it all, and your mind took the bit in its teeth and ran away with you. What you've got to do now is to try to forget all about it."

"Forget!"

"How I came to make such a mistake I cannot imagine, but when I got home I saw at once that there was an extra dose gone out of my strychnine bottle instead of out of the distilled water, and that explained it at once."

"_You_? ... _You_ made the mistake?" she looked up at him again, eagerly, with warped face and knitted brows, and a wavering flutter of hope in her eyes.... "You are only saying it to comfort me."

"I'm trying to show you how foolish it is to allow yourself to be ridden by this strange notion you've got into your head."

"Strange notion? ... Did he not beg me to get him that stuff he used for the rats? And did I not get it for him? And he took it. And then----" she shivered at the remembrance of what followed when her husband took the draught.

"All in that horrible dream when your mind was running away with you----"

"And did you not come and tell me they would hang me unless I kept my mouth shut? And I lay all that dreadful night with the rope round my neck----"

"All in your dream. I'm sorry. It must have been terribly real to you."

"A dream?" and she stared wistfully into the fire, hex hands clasping and unclasping nervously. "If I could believe it!"

"You must believe what I tell you, and forget all about it and recover yourself."

"And you?" she said after a pause.

"I shall be all right. Don't trouble your head about me."

"If I did not do it," she said, after another long silent gazing into the fire, "then there would be no need for you to hate me----"

"No need whatever,--all part of that stupid dream."

"And ... sometime perhaps ... you would think better of me ... as you used to do. Oh,--Wulfrey! ..."

If it had all happened as he had almost persuaded her to believe, he might have fallen into his own pit.

For, under the stress of her emotions,--the wild hope of the possibility of relief from the horror that had been weighing her down,--the letting in of this thread of sunshine into the blackness of her despair,--the sudden joy of the thought that it was not she who needed Wulfrey's forgiveness, but he hers;--the shadows and the years fell from her, and she was more like the Elinor Baynard he had once been in love with than he had seen her since the day she married Pasley Carew.

"We must not think of any such things," he said quickly, but not unkindly. He was very sorry for her, but he was no longer in love with her. "At present all we've got to think about is getting you quite yourself again. I will send you up some medicine,--if you won't be afraid to take it----"

"Oh, Wulfrey! ..." with all the reproach she could put into it, and anxiously, "You will come again soon?"

"If you get on well perhaps. If you don't I shall turn you over to Dr Newman," and he left her.

"She ain't agoing to die, Doctor?" asked Mollie, as she waylaid him.

"No, Mollie. She's going to get better."

"Ah, I knew it'd do her good if you came to see her," said the astute handmaid with an approving look.

"Get her to eat and feed her up. She's been letting herself run down."

"Ah, she'll eat now maybe, if so be 's you've given her a bit of an appet.i.te," said Mollie hopefully; and Dr Wulfrey went away home.

XI

But even two patients hardly make a practice, and though from the stolid commoner folk calls still came for 'th' Doctor's' services, upon the better cla.s.ses a sudden blessing of unusual health appeared to have fallen, or else----

Dr Newman bought a horse about this time, and, though he did not as yet cut much of a figure on horseback, it enabled him to get about as he had never had occasion to do since he settled in the village, and it seemed as though, in his case as in others, practice would in time make him pa.s.sable.