“Tell her I have been called away suddenly on business,” he says, speaking in quick, low tones: “I shall be away for some days. Tell her to leave here and return home immediately. They can do without her here now. Tell her to go back home at once. I will join her there.” He moves toward the door but stops and faces round again. “Tell her I beg and entreat her not to stop in this place an hour longer. There is nothing to keep her now. It is all over: there is nothing that cannot be done by any one. Tell her she must go home—this very night. Tell her if she loves me to leave this place at once.” The woman, a little bewildered by his vehemence, promises, and disappears down the stairs. He takes his hat and cloak from the chair on which he had thrown them, and turns once more to cross the hall. As he does so, the door opens and Anne enters. He darts back into the shadow, squeezing himself against the wall. Anne calls to him laughingly, then, as he does not answer, with a frightened accent: “John,—John, dear. Was not that you? Are not you there?” He holds his breath, and crouches still closer into the dark corner; and Anne, thinking she must have been mistaken in the dim light, passes him and goes upstairs. Then he creeps stealthily to the door, lets himself out and closes it softly behind him. After the lapse of a few minutes the old housekeeper plods upstairs and delivers John’s message. Anne, finding it altogether incomprehensible, subjects the poor dame to severe examination, but fails to elicit anything further. What is the meaning of it? What “business” can have compelled John, who for ten weeks has never let the word escape his lips, to leave her like this—without a word! without a kiss! Then suddenly she remembers the incident of a few moments ago, when she had called to him, thinking she saw him, and he did not answer; and the whole truth strikes her full in the heart. She refastens the bonnet-strings she has been slowly untying, and goes down and out into the wet street. She makes her way rapidly to the house of the only doctor resident in the neighbourhood—a big, brusque-mannered man, who throughout these terrible two months has been their chief stay and help. He meets her on her entrance with an embarrassed air that tells its own tale, and at once renders futile his clumsy attempts at acting:— How should he know where John is? Who told her John had the fever—a great, strong, hulking fellow like that? She has been working too hard, and has got fever on the brain. She must go straight back home, or she will be having it herself. She is more likely to take it than John.