m the station.

He was to be away one night--starting at four in the morning he would
rest at the hotel for the night and start back next morning. That night
Marcella lay long awake, thinking about him. She was vaguely anxious;
when she fell asleep she dreamed that he came home to Castle Lashcairn
drunk. He was talking French--his eyes were wild, his mouth loose and
slobbering, his tongue bitter.

She started up in fright and rolled out of the hammock.

"No--no. It couldn't happen again. It couldn't. We could never live now,
if we were to get miserable like that after we've been so happy. He's
so--so clean, now. He can't get dirty again."

She could not sleep after that, and walked down to the lake in the
moonlight. She was really feeling ill. Louis's lectures and diagrams and
descriptions of "midder" cases at the hospital sickened and frightened
her. Mrs. Twist, with the average woman's unscientific and morbid
interest in such illness, sickened her still more.

The moonlight was very bright; the weather was warm, for May. Louis had
begged her not to swim now. She had given in to him rather than worry
him, but a sudden impulse to do what she thought pleasant without
troubling him came to her, and she slipped out of her nightgown quickly.
The lake lay at her feet, a shimmering pool of silver, almost without
ripples. It lapped very gently against her feet, bringing back the
softly lapping waters of Lashnagar on spring mornings. It was adorably,
tinglingly cold; she forgot the dream in the exhilaration and gave a
little cry of rapture as she waded further out. Then, without warning, a
ghost was in the water beside her. She stared, and knew that it was her
own reflection. With a little cry she hurried back to land, her heart
thumping wildly as she pulled on her nightgown over her wet body with
trembling hands.

"How horrible I look!" she whispered. "He mustn't know I look as awful
as that!"

The next day she waited for him, anxious to unpack the thrilling parcel
from Sydney, but he did not come, and all the night she sat waiting,
afraid that he had met with some accident. If someone had come, then,
and told her he was drunk she would not have believed it. It seemed to
her just as unreal a thing as last night's dream.

But at four o'clock in the morning as she sat on the verandah, half
nodding with red-rimmed, heavy eyes, she saw him come stumbling along,
holding on to the pony's neck.

She went out to meet him, k