with you to some safe place."

"Good Lord!" he said, laughing harshly. "I'm just thinking of Violet."

"Why? She can't mind, now she's married."

"No. It was the idea of Violet's trying to kidnap me, and loving me
because I depended on her. Lord, she did the depending."

"That was why she wasn't any use to you, I suppose. Besides, Louis, you
know, I love you when you're not--not ill. And I love the way your eyes
look."

"Good Lord," he cried again, and started up sharply. "I say, Marcella,
I'm off to have a bath. Wait here for me--" He peeped into her mirror.
He had not shaved for a week and looked thoroughly disreputable. Holding
out his hand he looked at it earnestly. It shook, as he had expected.

"Oh, I say, what a waster I look. I do hope to the Lord my hand's steady
enough for a shave."

"Let me do it," she said. "It would be fun."

"I'm damned--Oh, I beg your pardon, old girl!--but I'm hanged if I'll
not make my hand steady. I'll do it, I tell you! If I cut myself in
bits, serve me right! I'll be half an hour and then--then--well, wait!"

She heard him in his cabin, whistling as he dragged out his trunk,
pushed it back roughly, dropped and smashed a tumbler and then rushed
along the alley-way. After awhile she heard him come back, heard the
sound of violent brushing, heard him kick things and swear, drop things,
bundle things about. She sat down on her trunk suddenly weak as she
realized what she had done. She had never thought of being married
before; marriage seemed a thing for elderly people; there seemed
something ungallant, something a little dragging about marriage that
rather frightened her. Her mother's marriage, she was beginning to
understand, had been a thing of horror. She thought of those stifled
cries in the night at the old farm, cries that she had thought meant
that ghosts were walking; she heard with terrible distinctness the voice
of the Edinburgh specialist as he said, "In my opinion the injury was
caused by a blow--a blow, Mr. Lashcairn." Then, quite suddenly she
laughed. It was quite amusing to think of Louis's making anyone ill by
a blow.

"He'd never have fought Ole Fred if they hadn't both been drunk," she
said slowly, staring at the boards of the floor, and her quick
imagination showed her the two of them, fighting ignobly, all dust and
sweat and ill-aimed blows. They could only hurt each other because both
were too unsteady to dodge futile lungings. There was nothing of the
B