Talbot has returned to his inn to dress for dinner, and has jumped into his dress-clothes, in miserly grudging of the moments stolen from his final hours. He had left Peggy with eager injunctions to be equally quick, so that a few more moments may be squeezed out before Sarah, with her clamorous dinner-bell, breaks, with life's loud prose, into the whispered poetry of their _tête-à-tête_. And apparently she has been obedient to his behest, for she is--though he would have thought it impossible--beforehand with him, and stands awaiting him, with arms resting on the top of the gate. But how is this? She has made no change in her dress, but is still in her morning cotton. As he draws near to her she stretches out her hand to him deprecatingly. 'I hope you will not be very angry!' A slight chill of apprehension passes over him. 'But I am sure that I shall,' he answers, with a hasty instinct to ward off the impending blow. 'What is it? What do you mean? Not,' with an accent of incredulous indignation, 'Prue again?' 'It is not her fault,' replies Peggy apologetically, and yet defensively too; 'nobody _enjoys_ being ill. But you know how finely strung she is; something must have upset her.' 'Something is always upsetting her!' returns Talbot brutally. 'I am afraid she must have taken a chill,' pursues Peggy, wrinkling up her forehead into anxious lines. 'I am sure I do not know how, but I think she must; she has had to go to bed.' The young man's brow clears. If Prue's illness involves only her absence from the dinner-table, he will not very violently quarrel with it after all. 'Very wise of her,' he says in a lighter voice; 'the best place for her! Poor Prue!' 'But----,' begins Peggy, whose brow has not smoothed itself in sympathy with her lover. 'But what?' inquires he sharply, his apprehensions returning. 'You are not going to tell me that on my last evening I am to be sacrificed to a _malade imaginaire_!' 'She is not a _malade imaginaire_,' answers Margaret half indignantly; 'her cheeks are as hot as fire, and her pulse has run up to ninety.' 'I believe she runs it up on purpose. Are you barring the gate for fear I should force my way in?' 'Oh, no, no!' cries she, hastily dropping her arms from their resting-place on the top rail, and flinging her portals hospitably wide. 'Come in! come in! how could you dream of such a thing? Do you suppose that I am going to send you away without your dinner? But after dinner----' 'After dinner?' 'When she is ill, she likes me to sit beside her, bathing her forehead and her hands. I have always done it, ever since she was a baby. When you are ill, I will bathe your forehead and your hands. Oh!' clasping her fingers soft and fast upon his arm, and looking up with brimful eyes into his angry face, 'do not look so cross at me! Do not you think that it is hard enough for me without that?' CHAPTER XXVIII