ntime, I must do as well as I can.

Grosse came back after his walk as mysterious as ever.

He was quite peremptory in ordering me not to overtask my
eyes--forbidding reading and writing, as I have already mentioned. But,
when I asked for his reasons, he had, for the first time in my experience
of him, no reasons to give. I have the less scruple about disobeying him,
on that account. Still I am a little uneasy, I confess, when I think of
his strange behavior yesterday. He looked at me, in the oddest way--as if
he saw something in my face which he had never seen before. Twice he took
his leave; and twice he returned, doubtful whether he would not remain at
Ramsgate, and let his patients in London take care of themselves. His
extraordinary indecision was put an end to at last by the arrival of a
telegram which had followed him from London. An urgent message, I
suppose, from one of the patients. He went away in a bad temper and a
violent hurry; and told me, at the door, to expect him back on the sixth.

When Oscar came later, there was another surprise for me.

Like Grosse, he was not himself--he too behaved strangely! First, he was
so cold and so silent, that I thought he was offended. Then he went
straight to the other extreme, and became so loudly talkative, so
obstreperously cheerful, that my aunt asked me privately whether I did
not suspect (as she did) that he had been taking too much wine. It ended
in his trying to sing to my accompaniment on the piano, and in his
breaking down. He walked away to the other end of the room without
explanation or apology. When I followed him there a little while after,
he had a look that indescribably distressed me--a look as if he had been
crying. Towards the end of the evening, my aunt fell asleep over her
book, and gave us a chance of speaking to each other in a little second
room which opens out of the drawing-room in this house. It was I who took
the chance--not he. He was so incomprehensibly unwilling to go into the
room and speak to me, that I had to do a very unladylike thing. I mean
that I had to take his arm, and lead him in myself, and entreat him (in a
whisper) to tell me what was the matter with him.

"Only the old complaint," he answered.

I made him sit down by me on a little couch that just held two.

"What do you mean by the old complaint?" I asked.

"Oh! you know!"

"I _don't_ know."

"You would know if you really loved me."

"Oscar! it is a shame to say