The tea came, and Bessie persuaded her friend to take some, prattling on all the time in the hope of diverting Ida from the silent contemplation of her trouble. But the horror of the case had taken too stern a hold upon Ida's brain. It was the dominant idea; as with the somnambulist whose perceptions are dead to every other subject save the one absorbing thought, and all subsidiary ideas linked with it by the subtle chain of association. Ida smiled a wan smile, and pretended to be interested in Bessie's parochial anecdotes--the idiosyncrasies of the new curate, the fatuity of every young woman in the parish in running after him. 'He is such a perfect stick; but then certainly there is no other single man in the parish under forty. He is like Robinson Crusoe. It is an awfully deceptive position for a young man to occupy. I know he is beginning to think himself quite handsome, while as for pimples--well, his face is like a Wiltshire meadow before it has been bush-harrowed.' Ida did not go down to dinner that evening. She felt utterly unequal to the effort of pretended cheerfulness, and she did not want to inflict a countenance of stony gloom upon Mr. and Mrs. Jardine, or on Vernie, who was going to dine late for the first time since his illness. So she sat by the open window overlooking the woods, gray in the universal twilight grayness, and she read Victor Cousin's 'History of Philosophy,' which was a great deal more comforting than fiction or poetry would have been, as it carried her into regions of abstract thought where human troubles entered not. For the next three days things went on quietly enough. Brian never left his own apartments, now an ample range, since Ida's bedroom had been thrown into the suite, so as to give him space and verge enough for his roaming when the restless fit was on him: and, alas! how seldom did he cease from his restlessness. He now saw scarcely anyone but his nurses and Mr. Fosbroke, who called three times a day, and was altogether devoted in his watchfulness of the case. Ida had not ceased from visiting the invalid until it became too obvious that her presence was irritating to him. He recalled the most painful scenes of their past experience, raved about his marriage, and accused his wife of cruelty and greed of wealth, wept, stormed, blasphemed, until Ida rushed shuddering from the room. To the nurses this wild talk was only part and parcel of the patient's hallucinations; to Ida it was too real.