"No," she said; and her voice was singularly clear and sweet, but with something foreign in the slow accentuation of words. "I only arrived at this hotel last night." "Oh!" said Mrs Jefferson, "is that so? I thought I hadn't seen you before. Come for your health?" "Yes," said the stranger, accepting a glass of water from the attendant, who had just come forward. "Not gout, I suppose?" suggested Mrs Jefferson, conscious that there were arched feet in the world even more exquisite in shape and size than her own. "Gout! Oh, no!" said the stranger, smiling faintly. "They say my nerves are not strong. I sleep badly, I am easily startled, and easily fatigued." She paused a moment, and one delicate hand, glittering with rings, pushed back the dark weight of rippling hair from her brow. "I have had a great mental shock," she said, quietly. "Such things require time... one cannot easily forget..." Her eyes had grown dreamy and abstracted. The hand that had pushed back her heavy hair fell on her lap. She looked at it and its shining rings, and Mrs Jefferson's sharp glance followed hers. Was there a plain gold circlet among that glittering array?--was the beautiful stranger wife or maiden? "If any man saw her now!" she thought involuntarily. "My! I wouldn't give much for his peace of mind afterwards! What owls she makes us all look!" "Nerves are queer things," she said aloud. "Can't say I'm much troubled with them, except here," and she moved her foot explanatorily. "Just that joint. It's agony sometimes. Suppressed gout, you know. You wouldn't think so to look at it, would you?" "That the gout was--suppressed? certainly I should," answered the stranger, smiling. "There is no external sign of it. I always thought gout meant large lumps, and swellings of the joints." "So it does," said Mrs Jefferson, with an involuntary glance at the moist and crimson sufferer on her right. "But my form of it is different. It is much worse, but no one sympathises with me because it doesn't _look_ so bad as the other gout." "It is not often that people do sympathise with illness," said the beautiful woman. "When we ourselves are well, we think suffering can't be so very great after all, and when we are ill we are quite sure no one else has to bear so much pain. Human nature is essentially selfish. It is a natural incident of living at all that we should estimate our own life as more important than our neighbours." "Well," laughed Mrs Jefferson, "if we sacrificed it to them, it might be a doubtful benefit. I often thank my stars I wasn't born in the age of martyrs. If J. had been, I'm sure the very sight of the rack or the faggot would have made me swear anything."