He bent his head and their lips met. Hilda unclasped her arms and moved away from him, and he made no attempt to keep her. Looking at her with a characteristic mingling of suffering and rather grimly emphatic humor, he said-- "I will wait." And turning away, he walked out of the room. CHAPTER XII For two whole weeks--strange cataclysm in the Archinard household--Hilda stayed in bed really ill. Taylor waited on her with an indignant devotion that implied, by contrast, worlds of repressed antagonism; for Taylor had highly disapproved of her trip with Katherine, and when she announced to Hilda on the day after the great catastrophe that Katherine had returned to England, she added with emphasis-- "But I don't go this time, Miss Hilda. It's your turn to have a maid now." The news took a weight of dread from Hilda's heart. She shrank from again seeing her own guilt looking at her from Katherine's tragic eyes. She did not need Katherine to impress it; during long days and dim, half delirious nights it haunted her, the awful sense of irremediable wrong, of everlasting responsibility for her sister's misery. With all the capability for self-torture, only possessed by the most finely tempered natures, she scourged her memory again and again through that blighting hour when she had appealed for and confessed a love that had dishonored her. She dwelt with sickening on the moment when she had said: "I love you, too!" Her conscience, fanatically unbalanced, distorted it with cruellest self-injustice. Indeed, such moments in life are difficult of analysis; the unconsciously spoken words followed by a consciousness so swift that in perspective they merge. In periods of clearer moral visions she could place her barrier, but only for mere flashes of relief, turned from with agony, as the dreadful fact of Katherine's ruined love surged over all and made of day and night one blackness. Hilda's love for Odd now told her that for months past it had been growing from the child's devotion, and, with the new torture of a hopeless longing upon her--for which she despised herself--she saw in the whole scene with him the base self-betrayal of a lovesick heart. Only a few days after Katherine's departure, the Captain returned. Hilda felt, as he would come in and look at her lying there with that weird sense of distance upon her, that her father was changed. He walked carefully in and out on the tips of the Archinard toes, and, outside the door, she could hear him talking in tones of fretful anxiety on her behalf. He hardly mentioned Katherine's broken engagement, and, for once in her life, Hilda was an object of consideration for her family. Even Mrs. Archinard rose from her sofa on more than one occasion to sit plaintively beside her daughter's bed; and it was from her that Hilda learned that they were going back to Allersley.