Gibbs went out into the outer office and sent the boy for a vehicle. There he remained, pen in hand, behind his desk until the jingle of the fly was heard at the door. He went back himself to the private office to call Castalia, and found her sitting in exactly the same place and attitude. She rose mechanically to her feet when he told her the fly was ready, but as she began to walk towards the door she staggered and caught at Gibbs's arm. He supported her with a sort of quiet gravity;--much as if he had been her old servant, and she a cripple whose infirmity was a matter of course,--which showed much delicacy of feeling, and as they neared the door he said in her ear, "Take my advice, ma'am, and tell your husband the truth." She turned her eyes on him with a singular look, but said nothing. "Tell him the truth! and--and look upward. Lift your heart in prayer. There is a fountain of grace and love ready for all who seek it!" "Not for me," she answered in a very low but distinct voice. "Oh, my poor soul, don't say so! Don't think so!" By this time she was in the carriage, having been almost lifted into it by Gibbs. She was perfectly quiet and tearless, and as the vehicle drove away, and Gibbs stood watching it disappear, he said to himself that her face was as the face of a corpse. CHAPTER XVII. Castalia was driven home, and walked up the path of the tiny garden in front of Ivy Lodge with a step much like her ordinary one. She went into the drawing-room and looked about her curiously, as if she were a stranger seeing the place for the first time. Then she sat down for a minute, still in her bonnet and shawl. But she got up again quickly from the sofa, holding her hand to her throat as if she were choking, and went out to the garden behind the house, and from thence to the meadows near the river. There was at the bottom of the garden, and outside of it, a miserable, dilapidated wooden shed, euphoniously called a summer-house. There was a worm-eaten wooden bench in it looking towards the Whit, and commanding a view of the wide meadows on the other side of it, of a turn in the river, now lead-coloured beneath a dreary sky, and of the distant spire of Duckwell Church rising beyond the hazy woods of Pudcombe. No one ever entered this summer-house. It was rotting to pieces with damp and decay, and was inhabited by a colony of insects and a toad that squatted in one corner. In this wretched place Castalia sat down, being indeed unable to walk farther, but feeling a sensation of suffocation at the mere thought of returning to the house. She fancied she could not breathe there. A steaming mist was rising from the river and the damp meadows beyond it. The grey clouds seemed to touch the grey horizon. It was cold, and the last brown leaf or two, hanging, as it seemed, by a thread on the boughs of a tree just within sight from the summer-house, twirled, and shook, and shuddered in the slight gusts of wind that arose now and again.