“No, don’t wait. Not on any account. Stevens knows everything to do for me. Show Mr. Stanton where the cigars are.” They were not in good humour when they left her. “I don’t smoke cigars,” Gabriel said abruptly when Dr. Kennedy made a feint of carrying out her wishes. Peter shrugged his shoulders. “She told me to find them for you.” “Has she had attacks like this before?” Gabriel asked, after a pause. Peter answered gloomily: “And will again if she is allowed to overtire herself by driving for hours in the sun, and then encouraged to sit through a long dinner, talking all the time.” “She ought not to have played?” Peter Kennedy threw himself on to the sofa, desecrating it, bringing an angry flush to Gabriel’s brow. But when he groaned and said: “If one could only do anything for her!” Gabriel forgave him in that instant. Gabriel had lived all his life with an invalid. Attacks of hysteria and faintness had been his daily menu for years. “But surely an attack of faintness is not very unusual or alarming? My sister often faints....” “She isn’t Margaret Capel, is she?” “You ... you knew Mrs. Capel before she came to Carbies?” “No, I didn’t. But I know her now, don’t I?” Gabriel was silent. He had seen a great many doctors too, before the Christian Scientists had broken their influence, but such a one as this was new to him. Margaret was so sacred and special to him that he did not know what to think. But Peter gave him little time for thinking. He fixed a gloomy eye upon him and said: “A man’s a man, you know, although he’s nothing but a country practitioner.” Gabriel was acutely annoyed, a little shocked, most supremely uncomfortable. “But ought you to go on attending her?” he got out. “I shan’t do her any harm, shall I, because I am madly in love with her, because I could kiss the ground she walks on, because I’d give my life for hers any day?” Gabriel’s face might have been carved. “She treats me like a dog....” Gabriel made a gesture of dissent, Margaret could not treat any one like a dog. “Oh, yes, she does, she says I’m not fit to wipe the mud off your shoes....” Then Margaret knew. He was a little stunned and taken by surprise to think Margaret knew her doctor was in love with her, knew and had kept him in attendance. But of course she was right, everything she did was right. She had not taken the matter seriously. “I suppose I’d better go.” Peter dropped his feet to the ground, rose slowly. “She won’t see me again if she says she won’t. She’s got her bromide. You might ring me up in the morning and tell me how she is, if she wants me to come round. That’s not too much to ask, is it?” he said savagely. “Not at all,” Gabriel answered coldly. “I should of course do anything she wished.” Peter paused a moment at the door. “I say, you’re not going to try and put her off me, are you? Just because I’ve let myself go to you?”