“A doctor!” she repeated, contemptuously, muttering to herself; “a clever doctor, truly, he would be who could cure me. A doctor!” she repeated aloud. “How can you be so foolish, Geoffrey? I don’t interfere with you, why should you interfere with me? Am I not to have liberty to rest for an hour or two, without you making yourself and me absurd by talking of doctors?” “But you said you were in pain remonstrated her husband, considerably relieved, and yet not a little amazed by this sudden and uncalled-for ebullition of petulance. “Well, and if I did?” she replied, wearily, but more gently. “Surely, Geoffrey, you can understand there are pains and pains! I am weary and exhausted, but I want no doctor. Leave me, I beg of you, leave me alone. I want to go to sleep—and to dream,” she added, to herself. Geoffrey left her, without saying more. Then, when she heard his steps receding down the passage, there visited her the first of a long chain of tormentors, who from that day became no strangers to her. A pang of self-reproach darted through her, for having so cruelly wounded the heart whose only fault was its devotion to her. “I have vexed him,” she thought, “vexed and hurt him for the first time since, since—that terrible mistake of ours! It is all a part of the wretched whole.” And then the ungenerous thought occurred to her—“It is his own fault. He has brought it on himself by persisting as he did. Save for that—.” And she hardened her heart against him. But not for long. She had wronged him, wronged him cruelly, in thinking those few petulant words of hers would have had power, even temporarily, to chill or alienate him. In five minutes he was back again, with a fragrant cup of tea and a delicate slice of bread and butter, which (forgive me, romantic readers) Marion was in her heart not sorry to see. She had eaten nothing since early morning, and violent emotion consumes the physical “tissue” no less surely than it exhausts the mental powers. She drank the tea eagerly, for her throat felt parched and dry. Then with a sudden revulsion of deep pity for the man whom she began to see she had so grievously deceived, she said timidly, glancing up at him with a world of conflicting feelings in her eyes— “Thank you, Geoffrey. You are very good. Are you vexed with me for being so cross?” “Vexed with you, my darling!” he replied, as he had done once before; “vexed with you! No, never fancy anything so impossible.” And he stooped and kissed her on the forehead. That was more than she had expected. She shrank back, half raising her hand, as if to repel him. Geoffrey looked surprised and concerned, but not hurt. The change in her would take a long time to come home to his unsuspecting heart. “I did not mean to tease you,” he said. “Is your head aching? I fear, my poor dear, you are suffering very much.”