With a good grace she said she was sorry to hear of Mr. Mortomley's illness and trusted he would soon be restored to health. With a bad grace she sent Mrs. Mortomley her forgiveness, and regretted Dolly's tendency to ill-temper was the besetting sin even her course of education had been unable to rectify. The one thing--she added with her own peculiar grace--she lamented to find was so strong a taint of vulgarity in her brother's child. The letter for which she so properly apologized would not have disgraced a Billingsgate fishwife. For that trait in her character she must have gone back to some alien blood. "Poor aunt!" remarked Dolly, putting the letter aside, "she will never be good friends with me again. If she knew how ill Archie is, I do not think she would be so hard upon me." Certainly Mr. Mortomley was very ill. For no light cause would Antonia Halling have summoned Mrs. Mortomley back as she did, but when she sent her telegram she really was afraid of the owner of Homewood dying in her hands. To Dolly sickness was nothing new. As a clergyman's daughter she had been with it more or less all her life; less certainly since her marriage than before that event. But one strong experience is perhaps enough. She had helped nurse her father; nay, she had tended him more unweariedly than any one else, and by reason of those vigils knew how to watch by the sick. Beside her husband she took her post, and through the valley of the shadow brought him back to health, or at least what the doctors were pleased to call health. They did not understand, though perhaps Dolly might instinctively, that the man who has once sickened through mental distress will never really even begin to recover until the mental pressure be removed. Hot and fast Richard Halling's bills were pouring in. Mr. Mortomley was beginning fully to understand what "lending a name" means. Unfortunately he believed he could, as he said to Dolly, "win through"; and in that belief he was encouraged by the holders of every bill which had his name on the back of it. "We will renew, of course," they said, and Mortomley instead of facing the question put it off; just as you would do, reader, were you similarly situated and had a great deal to lose. So Mr. Mortomley, according to the doctors, was once again strong and able to attend to business. Nevertheless, his wife noticed he stayed a good deal in his laboratory after his attack, whilst his nephew went to town to look after affairs there. Indeed, the man's nerves were so shaken, his organization being delicate, that Dolly felt very glad to see any one, even Rupert, take his place in the City. The doctors had their own way at last, and Homewood was quiet. In the face of her husband's illness, Dolly could not prove a gadabout. With unusual embarrassments surrounding him, Mortomley could not entertain as his fathers had done before he was thought of.