"You don't know what you want. You're overstrained--frightfully--and you ought to have a long rest and a change. You're too good, you know, to my little sister. I've told you before that I won't allow you to sacrifice yourself to her. I shall get some one to come and stay, and I shall take you down this week to the south coast, or wherever you like to go. It'll do you all the good in the world to get away from this beastly place for a month or two." "It'll do me no good to get away from poor Edie." "It will, dearest, it will, really." "It will not. If you go and take me away from Edie I shall get ill myself." "You only think so because you're ill already." "I am not ill." She turned to him her sombre, tragic face. "Walter--whatever you do, don't ask me to leave Edie, for I can't." "Why not?" he asked gently. "Because I love her. And it's--it's the only thing." "I see," he said; and left her. He went back to Edith. She smiled at his disarray and enquired the cause of it. He entertained her with an account of his labours. "How funny you must both have looked," said Edith, "and, oh, how funny the poor drawing-room must feel." "The fact is," said Majendie gravely, "I don't think she's very well. I shall get her to see Gardner." "I would, if I were you." He wrote to Dr. Gardner that night and told Anne what he had done. She was indignant, and expounded his anxiety as one more instance of his failure to understand her nature. But she did not refuse to receive the doctor when he called the next morning. When Majendie came back from the office he found his wife calm, but disposed to a terrifying reticence on the subject of her health. "It's nothing--nothing," she said; and that was all the answer she would give him. In the evening he went round to Thurston Square to get the truth out of Gardner. He stayed there an hour, although a very few words sufficed to tell him that his hope had become a certainty. The President of the Scale Philosophic Society had cast off all his vagueness. His wandering eyes steadied themselves to grip Majendie as they had gripped Majendie's wife. To Gardner Majendie, with his consuming innocence and anxiety, was, at the moment, by far the more interesting of the two. The doctor brought all his grave lucidity to bear on Majendie's case, and sent him away unspeakably consoled; giving him a piece of advice to take with him. "If I were you," said he, "I wouldn't say anything about it until she speaks to you herself. Better not let her know you've consulted me." In one hour Majendie had learnt more about his wife than he had found out in the year he had lived with her; and the doctor had found out more about Majendie than he had learnt in the ten years he had been practising in Scale. And upstairs in her drawing-room, little Mrs. Gardner waited impatiently for her husband to come back and finish the very interesting conversation that Majendie had interrupted.