I was losing Tom sure, and it made me very sad, and made the old life to which I must return seem harder than before. Perhaps it was this, and perhaps it was that I had no vital force with which to rally, no bank to draw from, as the physician said, which kept me an invalid all that winter, with barely strength to walk about my room, and drive occasionally with Tom, who came to see me nearly every day, and who surrounded me with every possible comfort and luxury, even to the providing me with a maid to wait upon me. I protested against this, knowing how hard it would be to go back to my work after so much petting, and said so once to Tom when he was spending the evening with me. “Go back to your work again! What do you mean?” he asked, and I said: “Mean just what I say. Take care of myself as soon as I am able, and—and—you are married, as they say you are going to be.” Since the morning after the party he had never mentioned Miss Elliston or referred to her in any way, and his silence was beginning to annoy me, and so I added: “You are, are you not?” “Are what?” he asked, with a comical gleam in his eye. “Are going to be married?” I replied, and he continued: “Yes, I believe I am, provided the lady will have me. Do you think she will?” “Have you! Of course she will,” I said, quite vehemently, and felt my whole face burn with excitement. “And if I do marry,” Tom added, “why should that compel you to return to your teaching, I’d like to know? Wouldn’t you still be my care?” “No,” I answered, emphatically. “I shall just take care of myself as I did before you came from India. It will not be any harder.” “I’m not so sure of that,” Tom answered, with a laugh, nor was I so sure of it either, and after he was gone I remember that I cried bitterly over the certainty of his marriage and the change it would bring to me.