She looked back with a kind of shrinking horror to the mental struggle she had gone through before the accident which had so wholly changed all the circumstances of her life. Those days when she believed that Berwick would never return to her were ill to remember. Then had come the fire, followed by hours of physical pain and terror of death, but now she looked back on those hours with positive gratitude, for they had surely brought an experience nothing else could have given her. At once, with a resistless, quiet determination which had constrained those about Barbara into acquiescence, Berwick had established his right to be with her. The putting on of the coal--that act of service on the first evening--had been, so Doctor McKirdy later told himself with a twist of his thin lips, symbolic of what was to be his attitude to the Queen's Room and its present inmate. Berwick soon came and went as freely as if he had been the invalid's twin brother, or he a father, and Barbara his sick child,--with, however, the one significant exception that both he and she refrained wholly from caress. The old Scotchman won a deep and an abiding place in the hearts of the two over whom he threw, during these days, the ample mantle of his eccentricity and masterful disposition. He moved over to the Priory, occupying a room close to Berwick's, and in some odd fashion he made each member of the large household believe that it was by his order and wish that Berwick was so often with his patient, concerning the extent of whose injury many legends grew, for she was only tended by Scotch Jean, French Léonie, Doctor McKirdy, and--James Berwick. And so it was that, as often happens with regard to events which none could have foretold, and which would have been described before they occurred as clearly impossible, what went on excited, at any rate within the Priory, no comment. The strange situation which had arisen did not pass wholly without outside remark. Lucy Kemp at first came daily--indeed, sometimes twice a day--to sit with Barbara and to read to her; and though at those times Berwick kept out of the Queen's Room, there came a moment in Barbara's illness when she perceived, with a sad feeling of humiliation, that Lucy's visits were being curtailed, also that she never came to the Priory unaccompanied. To the girl herself her father's sudden stern objection to her daily visits to Mrs. Rebell had been inexplicable,--even more so her mother's refusal to discuss the question. Then a word said before her by Mrs. Boringdon, a question put to Oliver as to James Berwick's prolonged stay at Chancton, had partly opened Lucy's eyes. "Do you dislike my going to see Mrs. Rebell because Mr. Berwick is there?" With some hesitation Mrs. Kemp answered her: "Yes, my dear, that is the reason your father does not wish you to go to the Priory so often."