Her father, then, must have enough money to pay mortgages and debts, and Hilda lay with closed eyes while her forebodings leaped to possibilities and to probabilities. The Captain's good fortune showed to her in a dismal light of material dependence, and she could guess miserably at its source. She could guess who encompassed her feeble life with care, and who it was that shielded her from even a feather's weight of gratitude--for the Captain made no mention of his good luck. "Yes, we are going back to the Priory," Mrs. Archinard said, her melancholy eyes resting almost reproachfully upon her daughter's wasted face. "It would be pleasant were it not that fate takes care to compensate for any sweet by an engulfing bitter. Katherine to jilt Mr. Odd, and you so dangerously ill, Hilda. I do not wonder at it, I predicted it rather. You have killed yourself _tout simplement_; I consider it a simple case of suicide. Ah, yes, indeed! The doctor thinks it very, very serious. No vitality, complete exhaustion. I said to him, '_Docteur, elle s'est tuée._' I said it frankly." Mrs. Archinard found another invalid rather confusing. She had for so long contemplated one only, that, insensibly, she adopted the same tones of pathos and pity on Hilda's behalf, hardly realizing their objective nature. By the beginning of May they were once more in Allersley. It was like returning to a prior state of existence, and Hilda, lying in a wicker chair on the lawn, looked at the strange familiarity of the trees, the meadows, the river between its sloping banks of smooth green turf, and felt like a ghost among the unchanged scenes of her childhood. Mrs. Archinard found out, bit by bit, that it was tiresome to keep her sofa now that there was an opposition faction on the lawn; she realized, too, to a certain extent, what it was that Hilda had been to that sofa existence; without the background of Hilda's quiet servitude, it became flat and flavorless, and Mrs. Archinard arose and actually walked, and for longer periods every day, drifting about the house and garden in pensive contemplation of tenants' havoc. She sighed over the Priory and said it had changed very much, but, characteristically, she did not think of asking how the Priory had come to them again. The Captain vouchsafed no hint. He went rather sulkily through his day, fished a little--the Captain had no taste for a pleasure as inexpensive as fishing--and read the newspapers with ejaculations of disgust at political follies.