‘Have we been so long? We were enjoying ourselves, I suppose,’ said Fulvia, with a slight smile, as she approached his couch. ‘Che, che! Don’t excite yourself, or you will have a dreadfully bad night. You know you will.’ She spoke lightly, as one would speak to a fretful child, but without any of the tenderness one would use to such a child. Her face was hard, and her eyes undisturbed. ‘Go and stand a little way off,’ he told her, not heeding what she had said to him. ‘I want to see what you look like. What gown is that? How long have you had it? It’s a new one.’ He spoke excitedly. ‘Indeed it is not. I have had it on several times. The flowers are different, that’s all.’ ‘A preposterous dress for the occasion,’ he said crossly, but his eyes devoured the figure that wore it, and the face that looked so coldly and quietly down upon him from a little distance away. ‘That is very polite to Mrs. Hastings, who has done me the honour to come in evening dress,’ said Fulvia, and she pushed a chair forward for Minna. ‘Sit down here,’ she said to her, looking at her with, as Minna could not help thinking, an underlying feeling of some kind--hatred, or despair, or a boundless ennui, under the forced patience of her eyes--for they were patient, those eyes of Fulvia Marchmont, or, if it were not patience, it was death that was in them--the death of all susceptibility and sensibility. ‘I meant no harm to Mrs. Hastings,’ said Marchmont with a kind of disgusted apology in his tone. Then, after a pause, when both the women were seated, he began: ‘Fulvia, this doctor here isn’t up to anything. I ought to have been on my legs again long before now. Why don’t you hurry him up? I believe you are in league together, he and you, to keep me ill.’ ‘What a horridly uncomfortable feeling to have!’ said his wife dryly. ‘Not a feeling I should like to have at all. I would much rather die at once than be always suspecting that the people about me were slowly killing me.’ ‘Die!’ he repeated angrily. ‘I don’t mean to die, I can tell you. I mean to get well again--of course I shall. Bless my soul! I’m only five-and-thirty now. The idea of a man of five-and-thirty being incurably ill! Ridiculous! But I need very thorough treatment, and he doesn’t give it to me. He does nothing to make me well.’ ‘No? What do you mean? What do you want doing?’ ‘I want to have him dismissed, and another sent for.’ ‘Another? They are not so plentiful here. You remember what the man in London said about you?’ ‘Of course--every word.’ ‘Well, has anything been neglected which he advised? You have the little book in which I wrote it all out. You can check off each thing, and judge for yourself whether or not his orders have been obeyed. He’s the first authority in the world on such matters, and you know it.’ A kind of inarticulate growl or snarl was the response. Fulvia went on: