"Let him carry her himself!" Everard said, fiercely. "Look here, I'm best out of this. I'll go and dine somewhere." "My dear, you can't run away like that," she said, and, of course, prevailed. It was as Lucilla had said. Vera was rigid. She looked up at Everard with a smile of satisfaction at that fact. "What do you think of me now?" it seemed to ask. "Am I the sort of woman to turn your back on, and neglect?--a woman who at once becomes as stiff as a broomstick?" "She must be got upstairs and undressed," the doctor said to Barett. "Lean on me and try to walk," Barett implored the patient. She gave a defiant smile. "If my life depended on it I could not move a toe," she said. "If I took her head, and you her feet?" Everard suggested to the doctor--a plan at once negatived by Vera. "I won't be carried in that fashion," she said. "I am not a long woman, like Luce," she added. "Fred carries me with perfect ease." "I think you can manage it, Mr Barett," the doctor said. There was no help for it. Everard stooped to the task. He ought to have been a happy man, perhaps, with that burden in his arms. It was not as such he described himself to his wife afterwards. Halfway up the stairs he tripped, and she screamed. "Grip me! Grip me! Don't let me drop over the balusters!" she called. He laboured on, the cords bursting in his forehead, his legs bending, his throat swelling, his arms two seats of agony. Lucilla, who had gone before, cleared the mats out of his way. "It isn't much farther," she whispered. "He is not grasping me right," Mrs Butt cried in a terrified voice. "It's not how Fred grasps me. I am as easy as a child when he carries me. Oh! I shall drop--he is going to let me drop!" He thought he was, but made a superhuman effort, and tottered on. Having reached level ground he stopped, then started on again with a staggering run. In piloting her through the bedroom door he banged her head against the frame, and Vera gave a howl of rage and pain. The next minute she found herself hurled upon the bed. She remained as she fell, upon her face, uttering suffocating moans of angry shame and misery. Everard waited not a second to watch her there. He reeled from the room, and reaching the landing again, sank down there, ignominiously, sitting on the carpet, his back to the wall, a wreck of his spruce, dapper self, having bodily and spiritually reached the bounds of endurance. They telegraphed for her husband. "Let him come and take her home, and carry her himself!" Everard said, savagely. "It's his place to carry her, not mine. We've done our part--let her go." He came as soon as the train could bring him. Lucilla was able to tell him truthfully that his wife had lain and called upon his name all night. "He is kneeling by her bedside and kissing her, and crying over her," Lucilla told her husband, running down to him, her own eyes wet with tears. "Isn't it a mercy he loves her so?"