When, after his visit, Theresa Bilson, considerably flustered and offended, found McCabe breakfasting in the dining-room and offered profuse apologies for the inconvenience to which he must have been put by so early and unnecessary a call, the tender-hearted and garrulous, but choleric Irishman cut her uncommonly short. "And would you be supposing then, that if the dear blessed child should be desirous of consulting me I wouldn't have rejoiced to come to her a thousand times as early and from ten thousand times as far?" he enquired, between large mouthfuls of kidney and fried bacon. "The scheming little pudding-faced governess creature, with a cherry nose and an envious eye to her"--he commented to himself. "But you do not apprehend anything serious?" Theresa said stiffly--"Merely a slight chill?" "With a temperature dancing up and down like a mad thing between a hundred and one and a hundred and three? I'm dashed if I like the looks of her at all, at all, Miss Bilson; and I am well acquainted with her constitution and her temperament. She's as delicate a piece of feminine mechanism as it's ever been my fortune to handle, and has been so from a child. Mind and body so finely interwoven that you can't touch the one without affecting the other--that is where danger comes in.--And I am glad to find she has so competent a nurse as Mary Fisher--a wholesome woman and one to put faith in. I have given my full instructions to her." "But I"--Theresa began fussily, her face crimson. "Oh! I don't doubt you're devotion itself; only my first consideration is my patient, and so I make free to use my own judgment in the selection of my assistants. No disrespect to you, my dear lady. You are at home in more intellectual spheres than that of the sick-room. And now," he wiped his mouth with his napkin, twinkling at her over the top of it with small blue-grey eyes, at once merry, faithful, and cunning--"I'll be bidding you good-bye till the evening. I have told Mary Fisher I'll be glad to sleep here to-night. And I'll despatch a telegram to Sir Charles on my way through the village." "Sir Charles?" Theresa cried. "Yes," he answered her. "I find the darling girl's illness as serious as that." CHAPTER VII A SOUL AT WAR WITH FACT The deepest and most abiding demand of all sentient creatures, strong and weak alike, is for safety, or, that being unattainable, for a sense of safety, an illusion even of safety.