During these weeks of reprieve--she gives an inward dread start at the reappearance of such a word in her vocabulary in such a connection--besides the new armour that must be forged for her on the anvil of endurance, there is not one of the old pieces which she will not need. Even her lifelong _rôle_ of buffer will have to be reassumed, since, as time passes and confidence strengthens, Sir George’s angelic qualities retire a little into the background. The wearing tempers and frets of sixty-five years, that have been driven to their holes by the scourge of a great affliction, begin to show their ugly heads again. Once again with pseudo-patient irritability he turns over his food at luncheon, and sends messages of ironical compliment to the cook; once or twice he even snubs Rupert, though, in these cases, repentance follows so hard upon his sin as almost to overrun it. It is always for not being in enough haste to be well, that the father chides his son. Rupert has never been one to hurry, and he does not hurry now. “One would think that a man with a wife and a parson waiting for him might try to pick up a bit quicker!” Sir George says one day, champing his bit after finding Rupert with writing materials by his bedside. “If he can ask for a pen and ink, one would think he might just as well ask for a hat and stick.” “The pen and ink would tire you much the most of the two,” Lavinia answers, with a soothing smile, but not thinking it necessary to add that a like idea, in a modified degree, has crossed her own brain. Rupert is _not_ in haste to be well. From the doctor’s and nurse’s point of view, he is an ideal patient, never rebelling against the restrictions prescribed him, content with the narrow monotony of sick-room routine, with no restive manliness kicking against limitations cried out against as needless and unendurable. But then Rupert has always been more like a woman than a man. Hasn’t he always regretfully said so?--regretfully, not for being like a woman, but for not being really one. After all, his solitary heroism--_was_ it heroism? for what else could he have done? and his first impulse was undoubtedly _un_heroic--was a sport, an accident, that did not in the least represent the tree that grew it. The heart is an inn which harbours strange guests, and the landlord can’t be held answerable for their characters. Yet it is with an unspeakable horror of self-condemnation that Lavinia recognizes the quality of the visitors her own has been entertaining. They have been expelled with loathing; but nothing can alter the fact that they have lodged there. What a distance has she travelled from the hell of remorse--the anguish of pleading beside what was supposed to be Rupert’s bed of death!