But these nightly visits were not without their effects, and these intense studies could not be carried on without leaving their traces on the man. Mrs Berens was taken ill, and the doctor was called in. In her lonely widowed state, with nothing but her money, her dress, her mirror, and the visits and gossip of Duke's Hampton to amuse her, thirsting the while for the communings of a kindred spirit who would tell her she was far too young yet to give up thoughts of love, Mrs Berens felt that she must have some relaxation, and she took it in the form of fits of illness of the body and ditto ditto of the mind. For the former she called in Dr North, and told her pains. For the latter, the Reverend Hartley Salis, to whom she recounted her doubts, her sorrows, and her sufferings of mind; and in each case she felt better, though she did not take the medicine of the one nor follow out the precepts of the other. It was very wrong, no doubt, but it was very natural; and Mrs Berens, not middle-aged, and plump, and pleasing, and anxious to please, was very full of human nature. There was such satisfaction, too, in having her hand held by the doctor. So there was, too, when it was grasped at coming, and again at leaving, by bluff, manly Parson Salis; but they neither of them proposed, or went a step further than to be gently courteous and kind to the loving and lovable weak woman, who longed to empty the urn of her affection upon either head. And now poor Mrs Berens was in sad trouble. "I know it," she sobbed to herself, after a visit from the doctor. "Mary Salis will not confess, and Leo always holds one off; but he does love Leo, and she is holding him in her wicked chains, like one of those terrible witches we read about; and, poor dear man, she is breaking his heart. I've tried so hard to wean him from that dreadful love of a bad, base girl, and the more I try the worse he is." Mrs Berens sobbed till her eyes ached, and she bathed them with eau-de-cologne and water. "How dare I say she is bad and base?" she said half aloud, speaking to herself in the glass, as her handsome, large, blue swimming eyes looked appealingly at her; "because I know it. I'm sure of it. I can always feel it. I'm weak and foolish, but I should love him and cherish him, while she is trifling with him--I'm sure--and breaking his heart. "Oh, poor man, poor man!" she sighed; "how worn out and ill he looks! What shall I do? What shall I do?" Mrs Berens made up her mind what she would do. She could not send for the curate. She was not sufficiently ill for that. "And it would look so." She could not go and see him, for that would also "look so." Leo detested her, she knew, quite as much as she detested Leo, whom she declared to be so horribly young. But she could go and see poor Mary; and after well bathing her eyes, she stripped her little conservatory to get a good bunch of flowers for the invalid, and then went across to the Rectory.