he replied coldly. "First you think you're dying,
and then you think you're all right. You won't stir out of that bed
till the doctor's been, at any rate."

And she lodged the bowl dangerously between his knees. He pretended to
be contemptuous of her refusal to let him get up, but in fact he
was glad of an excuse for not making good his boast. His previous
statement that he was very ill was much nearer to the truth than the
fine talking about being "lots better." If not very ill, he was, at
any rate, more ill than he now thought he was, and eating had fatigued
him. Nevertheless, he would wash his own hands. Rachel yielded to him
in this detail with cynical indifference. She put the towel by the
bowl, and left him to balance the bowl and keep the soap off the
counterpane as best he could, while she rummaged in one of the drawers
of the wardrobe--obviously for the simple sake of rummaging.

Her unwifeliness was astounding; it was so astounding that Louis did
not all at once quite realize how dangerously he was wounded by it.
He had seen that hard, contumelious mask on her face several times
before; he had seen it, for instance, when she had been expressing her
views on Councillor Batchgrew; but he had not conceived, in his absurd
male confidence, that it would ever be directed against himself. He
could not snatch the mask from her face, but he wondered how he might
pierce it, and incidentally hurt her and make her cry softly. Ah!
He had seen her in moods of softness which were celestial to
him--surpassing all dreams of felicity!

The conviction of his own innocence and victimhood strengthened
in him. Amid the morbid excitations of the fear of death, he had
forgotten that in strict truth he had not stolen a penny from his
great-aunt, that he was utterly innocent. He now vividly remembered
that his sole intention in taking possession of the bank-notes had
been to teach his great-aunt a valuable lesson about care in the
guarding of money. Afterwards he had meant to put the notes back where
he had found them; chance had prevented; he had consistently acted for
the best in very sudden difficulties, and after all, in the result, it
was not he who was responsible for the destruction of the notes, but
Rachel.... True, that in the night his vision of the affair had been
less favourable to himself, but in the night illness had vitiated his
judgment, which was not strange, seeing the dreadful accident he had
experienced.... He _m