"Thank you, I will." She said it with perfect simplicity. Richard was conscious of a scarcely perceptible thrill. "You must have had an awful time last night, all alone," he said. "Yes, but I was too annoyed to feel upset." "Annoyed?" "Because uncle has brought it all on himself by carelessness. I do think it's a shame!" She stopped rocking, and sat up, her face full of serious protest. "He's not the sort of man to take care of himself. He never thought--" "That's just it. He should have thought, at his age. If he dies, he will practically have killed himself, yes, killed himself. There's no excuse, going out as he did, in spite of all I said. Fancy him coming downstairs last Sunday in the state he was, and then going out on Monday, though it _was_ warm!" "Well, we'll hope he will get better, and it may be a lesson to him." "Hark! What was that?" She sprang to her feet apprehensively and listened, her breast pulsing beneath the tight black bodice and her startled inquiring eyes fixed on Richard's. A very faint tinkle came from the rear of the house. "Perhaps the front-door bell," he suggested. "Of course. How silly of me! I fancied.... Who can it be at this time?" She went softly into the passage. Richard heard the door open, and then a woman's voice, which somehow seemed familiar,-- "How is Mr. Aked to-night? Your servant told our servant that he was ill, and I felt anxious." "Oh!" Adeline exclaimed, discomposed for a moment, as it seemed to Richard; then she went on coldly, "Uncle is about the same, thank you," and almost immediately closed the door. "A person to inquire about uncle," she said to Richard, with a peculiar intonation, on re-entering the room. Then, just as he was saying that he must go, there was a knock on the ceiling and she flew away again. Richard waited in the passage till she came downstairs. "It's nothing. I thought he was dying! Oh!" and she began to cry freely and openly, without attempting to wipe her eyes. Richard gazed hard at the apron string loosely encircling her waist; from that white line her trembling bust rose like a bud from its calyx, and below it the black dress flowed over her broad hips in gathered folds; he had never seen a figure so exquisite, and the beauty of it took a keener poignancy from their solitude in the still, anxious night--the nurse and the sick man were in another sphere. "Hadn't you better go to bed?" he said. "You must be tired out and over-excited." How awkward and conventional the words sounded! CHAPTER XV In Adeline's idiosyncrasy there was a subtle, elusive suggestion of singularity, of unexpectedness, which Richard in spite of himself found very alluring, and he correctly attributed it, in some degree, to the peculiar circumstances of her early life, an account of which, with characteristic quaintness, she had given him at their second meeting. * * * * *