looking
on; that Brookshire was on the side of Diana Mallory, the forsaken, and
was not at all inclined to forgive either the deserting lover or the
supplanting damsel; so that while she was not loath to sting and mystify
Brookshire by whatever small signs of her power over Oliver Marsham she
could devise; though she queened it beside him on his coach, and took
charge with Lady Lucy of his army of women canvassers; though she faced
the mob with him at Hartingfield, on the occasion of the first
disturbance there in June, and had stood beside him, vindictively
triumphant on the day of his first hard-won victory, she would wear no
ring, and she baffled all inquiries, whether of her relations or her
girl friends. Her friendship with her cousin Oliver was nobody's concern
but her own, she declared, and all they both wanted was to be let alone.

Meanwhile she had been shaken and a little frightened by the hostile
feeling shown toward her, no less than Oliver, in the first election.
She had taken no part in the second, although she had been staying at
Tallyn all through it, and was present when Oliver was brought in, half
fainting and agonized with pain, after the Hartingfield riot.

* * * * *

Oliver, now lying with closed eyes on his sofa, lived again through the
sensations and impressions of that first hour: the pain--the arrival of
the doctor--the injection of morphia--the blessed relief stealing
through his being--and then Alicia's face beside him. Delivered from the
obsession of intolerable anguish, he had been free to notice with a kind
of exultation the tears in the girl's eyes, her pale tremor and silence.
Never yet had Alicia wept for _him_ or anything that concerned him.
Never, indeed, had he seen her weep in his whole life before. He
triumphed in her tears.

Since then, however, their whole relation had insensibly and radically
changed; their positions toward each other were reversed. Till the day
of his injury and his defeat, Marsham had been in truth the wooed and
Alicia the wooer. Now it seemed to him as though, through his physical
pain, he were all the time clinging to something that shrank away and
resisted him--something that would ultimately elude and escape him.

He knew well that Alicia liked sickness and melancholy no more than he
did; and he was constantly torn between a desire to keep her near him
and a perception that to tie her to his sick-room was, in fact, the
w