Her name--nothing more; but he felt her tremble in his arms and hang more heavily as her head sank slowly back, bringing her lips nearer his; and the next moment she uttered a low sigh, breathed in their lengthened kiss. "Out of what comedy is this, doctor?" said a harsh, familiar voice; and as they started angrily apart, Jem, as they called him, advanced quickly from the silently opened door, straight towards Marion, upon whom he fixed his fierce eyes, as he spoke to her companion. "French, I suppose--a translation. I congratulate you, doctor--both of you. It was so real--so passionately grand. And you," he literally hissed now, "most loving sister! _Pour passer le temps_, of course. The _ennui_ of long nursing. Curse you!" he whispered savagely, as he stopped before her, and with a quick movement caught her by the wrist. The next moment he uttered a hoarse cry of rage, for, stung to madness by the brutal act, Chester sprang at him, forcing him back over the table before which he stood, while Marion was flung aside. CHAPTER SEVEN. A BLACK CLOUD BEHIND. "Where am I?" Head throbbing horribly, a nauseous taste in the mouth, throat constricted and painful upon an attempt to swallow, and a strange mental confusion which provoked the above question. The answer came at once. In a miserable, musty-smelling, four-wheeled cab, whose windows were drawn up, and so spattered with mud and the heavy rain which fell upon the roof that the gleam from the street lamps only produced a dim, hazy light within, as the vehicle jangled slowly along, with wheels and some loose piece of iron rattling loudly in concert with the beat of the horse's feet. "Whatever am I doing here?" was Fred Chester's next question. Lying back in the corner, in an awkward position, as if in a state of collapse, and only saved from subsiding into the bottom of the cab by his feet being propped up on the front cushion, the doctor kept perfectly still trying to think, but every retrogressive attempt gave the idea that he was gazing at a vast black cloud which completely shut out the past. He uttered a faint groan, for he felt startled; but after lying back listening to the beating rain and the jarring of the ill-fitting glasses, he recovered somewhat. "How absurd!" he muttered. "Where am I going? Ask the driver." He drew up his legs and let his feet drop into the cab, as he tried to sit up, but the effort gave him the sensation of molten lead running from one of his temples to the other, and he lay perfectly still while the agonising pain passed slowly away, trying hard to think what had happened, but in vain. There was the black cloud before him mentally, though he could see the gleaming of a lamp he passed through the blurred panes of glass.