had condoned the inexcusable
rejection of the arbitrators' award long ago. And then some one said:

"Hello! Here's Benbow back again!"

Albert, in overcoat and cap, beckoned to Edwin, who sprang up, pricked
into an exaggerated activity by his impatient conscience.

"It's nothing particular," said Albert at the door. "But the missus has
been round to your father's to-night, and it seems the nurse has knocked
up. She thought I'd perhaps better come along and tell you, in case you
hadn't gone."

"Knocked up, has she?" said Edwin. "Well, it's not to be wondered at.
Nurse or no nurse, she's got no more notion of looking after herself
than anybody else has. I was just going. It's only a little after
eleven."

The last thing he heard on quitting the precincts of the banqueting
chamber was the violent sound of the mallet. Its wielder seemed to have
developed a slight affection for the senseless block of wood.

VOLUME THREE, CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

AFTER THE BANQUET.

"Yes, yes," said Edwin, impatiently, in reply to some anxious remark of
Maggie's, "I shall be all right with him. Don't you worry till
morning."

They stood at the door of the sick-room, Edwin in an attitude almost
suggesting that he was pushing her out.

He had hurried home from the festival, and found the doctor just leaving
and the house in a commotion. Dr Heve said mildly that he was glad
Edwin had come, and he hinted that some general calming influence was
needed. Nurse Shaw had developed one of the sudden abscesses in the ear
which troubled her from time to time. This radiant and apparently
strong creature suffered from an affection of the ear. Once her left
ear had kept her in bed for six weeks, and she had arisen with the drum
pierced. Since which episode there had always been the danger, when the
evil recurred, of the region of the brain being contaminated through the
tiny orifice in the drum. Hence, even if the acute pain which she
endured had not forced her to abandon other people's maladies for the
care of her own, the sense of her real peril would have done so. This
masterful, tireless woman, whom no sadness nor abomination of her
habitual environment could depress or daunt, lived under a menace, and
was sometimes laid low, like a child. She rested now in Maggie's room,
with a poultice for a pillow. A few hours previously no one in the
house had guessed that she had any weakness whatever. Her collapse gave
to Maggie an exc