Through fire and frost and snow I see you go, I see your feet that bleed, My heart bleeds too. I, who would give my very soul for you, What can I do? I cannot help your need. That first evening was one of many others, all on very much the same pattern. David Blake would come in, after tea, or after dinner, sit for an hour in almost total silence, and then go away again. Every time that he came, Elizabeth’s heart sank a little lower. This change, this obscuring of the man she loved, was an unreality, but how some unrealities have power to hurt us. December brought extra work to the Market Harford doctors. There was an epidemic of measles amongst the children, combined with one of influenza amongst their elders. David Blake stood the extra strain but ill. He was slipping steadily down the hill. His day’s work followed only too often upon a broken or sleepless night, and to get through what had to be done, or to secure some measure of sleep, he had recourse more and more frequently to stimulant. If no patient of his ever saw him the worse for drink, he was none the less constantly under its influence. If it did not intoxicate him, he came to rely upon its stimulus, and to distrust his unaided strength. He could no longer count upon his nerve, and the fear of all that nerve failure may involve haunted him continually and drove him down. “Look here, Blake, you want a change. Why don’t you go away?” said Tom Skeffington. It was a late January evening, and he had dropped in for a smoke and a chat. “The press of work is over now, and I could very well manage the lot for a fortnight or three weeks. Will you go?” “No, I won’t,” said David shortly. Young Skeffington paused. It was not much after six in the evening, and David’s face was flushed, his hand unsteady. “Look here, Blake,” he said, and then stopped, because David was staring at him out of eyes that had suddenly grown suspicious. “Well?” said David, still staring. “Well, I should go away if I were you—go to Switzerland, do some winter sports. Get a thorough change. Come back yourself again.” There was ever so slight an emphasis on the last few words, and David flashed into sudden anger. “Mind your own business, and be damned to you, Skeffington,” he cried. Tom Skeffington shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, certainly,” he said, and made haste to be gone. Blake in this mood was quite impracticable. He had no mind for a scene.