‘And he’ll sit here for ten minutes, and tell us nothing that we didn’t know before, and then he’ll go away, and jabber with you in the drawing-room. You are all in league against me--every one of you.’ ‘Do you think we should find it very difficult to dispose of you if we were?’ she asked, with icy contempt. ‘As you do not wish to have Sir Simon, I will send a man after Mr. Brownrigg, and ask him not to telegraph.’ ‘Do if you dare!’ almost shrieked Marchmont. ‘I’m ill, I dare say, but I have the use of my brains yet, and I know what I am doing. You want to leave me in the hands of this wretched village ignoramus, so that I may get partial recovery, and then you will be satisfied.’ ‘You credit me with complicated motives. I am quite sure of this, that if you don’t behave more civilly to the “village ignoramus,” as you call him, he will refuse to come near you any more; and you will have to trust me alone as your physician. Of course no man, not to mention a gentleman, will stand being spoken to as if he were a thief and an impostor. I really think you had better try to understand that thoroughly.’ Marchmont subsided a little. There was nothing he feared so much as being left alone with his illness; rather than suffer that, he would have grovelled before the meanest apothecary and would have implored him not to leave him to his fate. That afternoon an answer came from Sir Simon to say he would come on the following afternoon. Fulvia had promised Hans to meet him on the morning of that day, but she sent him a note to say: ‘I cannot leave the house this morning, nor at all till evening. But I must see you before I try to sleep to-night. I have much to explain to you. All scruples have disappeared. I cannot live in this any longer. Meet me after nine, at the same place. I will come and will tell you what I have arranged.’ The day wore on. She scarcely left Marchmont’s side, sitting near him, ministering to him during the hours in which the nurse was to take her rest; looking at him every now and then, with a strange, sombre light in her eyes, the inner glow of all the suppressed passion and wrong, and injustice and wretchedness, which for five years had been accumulating in her heart--the only light which can be given by the eyes which belong to a ruined life. All the day she was saying to herself, with fixed, immovable resolution: