Toothache, face-ache, neuralgia, according to fashion, but maddening all the same. A pain born of care and anxiety, close confinement, abstinence, the damp unchanging foggy air, and settled in the face of a heroine, to take, as it were, all the romance of her history. But there it was all the same, fiercely stabbing, jerking, as if some virulent little demon were holding ends of the facial nerves in a pair of pincers, and waiting till the sufferer was a little calm for a few moments before giving the nerve a savage jig. After the tug a pause of sickening agony, and then that slow, red-hot suffering again, as if a blunt augur was being made to form a channel beneath the teeth, so that the aching pains, as of hot lead, might run round without let or hindrance. Neuralgia, with sleepless nights; neuralgia, with Hendon Chartley's progress at the hospital; neuralgia, with the trouble about Janet; neuralgia, with James Poynter's coarse vulgar face full of effrontery always before her, flaunting his possessions, his power, and his influence, and staring with parted lips over the words which somehow he had never yet dared to utter, but which sooner or later she knew must come. Neuralgia, with the constant dread that some day her father would indulge too deeply in the opiate she knew he took every evening; neuralgia, with the constant carking care of the unpaid tradespeople: and, above all, that wearisome agony, mingled with the chilling heartache and those memories of the man from whom she had parted when in his ardent desire he had told her that it was for her sake he was going to leave England, to come back some day a rich man, and ask her to be his wife. "Dead, dead, dead!" moaned Rich, as she paced the room; "and if I, too, could only be sleeping, for it is more than I can bear!" But as the words left her lips, she threw her head back, and pressed her long hair from her face. "What a coward I am!" she cried, "with others looking to me for help, and shrinking from bearing a little pain!" She hurried to the door, telling herself that there was relief in the surgery for all she suffered; but as she went along the dark passage to the door she felt that there was one only anodyne for the greater pain she bore. As she slowly approached there was a quick scuffing noise, a dull rattle as of something falling, and the loud closing of a heavy lid; then, as she opened the door, she found Bob turning to meet her with an innocent smile upon his face, while he was uttering a low humming noise, as if he were practising the art of imitating a musical bee. "What have you been doing, Bob?" said Rich hastily. "Me, Miss? Doing?" said the boy wonderingly. "I ain't a-been doing nothing. 'Tain't likely, 'mong all these here dangerous thinks;" and Bob waved his hand round the surgery, as if indicating the bottles and specimen jars. "Because you have been warned frequently, sir, not to meddle." "Course I have, Miss, and I wouldn't do no harm."