"Now and then he has a touch of it," she said. "Very few of us don't have something. But we have to go on, and we do go on, nevertheless." "I think a wise doctor would probably order your husband away," said Malling, though Mr. Harding's departure was the last thing he desired just then. "Even if he were ordered away, I don't know that he would go." "Why not?" "I don't think he would. I don't feel as if he could get away," she said, with what seemed to Malling a sort of odd obstinacy. "In fact, I know he's not going," she abruptly added. "I have an instinct." Malling felt sure that she had considered, perhaps long before he had suggested it, this very project of Mr. Harding's departure for a while for rest, and that she had rejected it. Her words recalled to his mind some other words of her husband, spoken in Mr. Harding's study: "Surely one ought to get out of such an atmosphere, to get out of it, and to keep out of it. But how extraordinary it is the difficulty men have in getting away from things!" Perhaps Lady Sophia was right. Perhaps the rector could not get away from the atmosphere which seemed to be destroying him. "I dare say he is afraid to trust everything to his curates," observed Malling, prosaically. "He needn't be--now," she replied. In that "now," as she said it, there lay surely a whole history. Malling understood that Lady Sophia, suddenly perhaps, had given her husband up. Since Malling had first encountered her she had cried, _"Le roi est mort!"_ in her heart. The way she had just uttered the word "now" made Malling wonder whether she was not about to utter the supplementary cry, _"Vive le roi!"_ As he looked at her, with this wonder in his mind, Henry Chichester came into the room. There was an expression of profound sadness on his face, which seemed to dignify it, to make it more powerful, more manly, than it had been. The choir-boy look was gone. Malling of course knew how very much expression can change a human being; nevertheless, he was startled by the alteration in the curate's outward man. It seemed, to use the rector's phrase, that he had "shed his character." And now, perhaps, the new character, mysteriously using matter as the vehicle of its manifestation, was beginning to appear to the eyes of men. He showed no surprise at the sight of Malling, but rather a faint, though definite, pleasure. The way in which Lady Sophia greeted him was a revelation to Malling, and a curious exhibition of feminine psychology. She looked up at him from the low chair in which she was sitting, gave him her left hand, and said, "Are you very tired?" That was all. Yet it would have been impossible to express more clearly a woman's mental, not affectional, subjugation by a man, her instinctive yielding to power, her respect for authority, her recognition that the master of her master had come into the room. Her "_Vive le roi!_" was said.