‘I guessed it, Margaret. I guess it from your looks, your demeanour, your languor. I know that you do not rest properly at night, and that if you will not take seasonable advice you will be ill.’ ‘I am not ill,’ she answered in a low voice. ‘But you will be, which, under present circumstances, would greatly distress Janie. Will you not consent to see a doctor—if not for your own sake, for ours?’ I thought that physical care might in some measure relieve the mental disturbance under which she labours, or, at all events, prevent a repetition of her somnambulistic tendencies by which her secret may, some day, be made patent to the world. I never imagined she would guess my meaning; but the next moment I saw the mistake which I had made. ‘What have I been doing?’ she exclaimed, turning round with a rapidity for which I was totally unprepared. ‘What have I been saying? Tell me at once, Captain Norton; don’t keep me in suspense.’ And her dark eyes blazed upon me as though they would search into my very heart. I trembled beneath the look, and was dumb. ‘Why do you think I cannot rest—that I shall be ill?’ she re-demanded almost angrily; and then reading the truth, I suppose, in my confused demeanour, she added in a lower voice, a voice almost of terror, _Have I been walking in my sleep?_’ The ice was broken, then; and although I still felt very uncomfortable in speaking to her of the circumstance, I did not see any other course open to me than to tell her briefly of my endeavour to find out the reason of my wife’s alarm, and the consequences which had ensued from it. ‘I had not wished to mention this to you,’ I said apologetically, ‘and only the directness of your question should have drawn it from me. However, as it is, I daresay it is for the best; for though the occurrence is a common one, it is as well to guard against its repetition.’ ‘_What did I say?_’ was the only reply which she made to my concluding observation. I had so slurred over the fact of her speaking at all that I hoped it had escaped her notice; but the tone in which she put this question portended that she meant to have it answered. ‘What did I say to you, Captain Norton?’ she repeated firmly. I began to mumble something about the words of sleep-walkers being always unintelligible, but she brought me back to the point. ‘You must have heard me; in fact, I can see by your face that you _did_ hear. What was it that I said?’ ‘I was so sleepy, Margaret,’ I commenced, but I felt my voice shaking audibly,—‘so sleepy, and altogether so confused, and my memory not being of the best, that I—I—really I—’ She gazed at me for a minute earnestly, almost hungeringly—I could feel it, though I did not see it—but I kept my eyes fixed over the sea, and a dead silence ensued between us. A dead silence, until it was broken by the living sound of tears; and I turned to see her dear head bent to her saddle-bow, and her slight figure shaken with her grief.