I wonder why I am recapitulating all this. I think it is to show you I am in no mood for friendship. There are times when I am savage with pain, and times when I am exhausted from it, times when I feel bruised all over, so tender that the touch of a word brings tears, times when my overwhelming pity for myself leaves me incapable of realizing anything beyond my wrongs. I say I have won my freedom, but even this is untrue: at present I have only won six months of probation, during which I am still James Capel’s wife. Sometimes I think I shall never live through them, the stain of my connection with him is like mortification. The prelude played by the Musicians is a prelude to a dream. And still I am grateful you gave them to me. Yours very truly, MARGARET CAPEL. When I had read as far as this the codein exerted its influence. My eyelids drooped, I slept and recovered myself. The sense of what I was reading began to escape, I knew it was time to put the bundle away. There were not very many more letters. I put all the papers on the table by my side, then dropped off. Margaret betrayed herself completely in her letters. Gabriel Stanton was still a strange unrealisable figure. CHAPTER V The few words I had with Nurse Benham the next morning cleared the air and the situation between us. The strange thing was that at first she did not notice the parcel at all, still loose and untidy in the paper in which Dr. Kennedy had enwrapped it. Not until I told her to be careful not to spill the tea over it did it strike her to wonder how it came there. “Did Suzanne give you that?” she asked suspiciously. “She has not been in my room since you left me.” “That’s the very parcel you asked for the other night. How ever did you get hold of it?” “After you left me I got out of bed and fetched it.” “You got out of bed!” She grew red in the face with rage or incredulity. “Yes, twice. Once for the parcel and once for the scissors!” She did not speak at once, standing there with her flushed face. So I went on: “It is absurd for you to insist on me doing this or that, or leaving it undone. You are here to take care of me, not to bully and tyrannise over me.” “I am no good to you at all. I’d better go. You _will_ take matters into your own hands. I never knew such a patient, never. One would think you’d no sense at all, that you didn’t know how ill you were.” “That is no reason why I should not be allowed to get better. Believe me, the only way for that to come about is that I should be allowed to lead my own life in my own way.” “To get up in the middle of the night with the window wide open, to walk about the room in your nightgown!” “I should not have done so, you know, if you had passed me the things when I asked you for them.” “You don’t want a nurse at all,” she repeated.