not been so proud and so huffy I'd have kept you."

"Yes, but only for a time, dear. I saw it all in a flash to-night when
you lay there and I thought you were dead. Marcella, no savage would
have done that--hurting you just now."

"What rubbish! If you hadn't done it to me I would have done it to you,"
she said easily.

"Don't you see how hopeless it is? The very first time I go near whisky,
I want it. And this happens. I was a madman to-night. It means that
we've got to stick here for the rest of our lives. I daren't even go to
the store to fetch things for you when you're ill. I have to hide in a
hole like a fox when the dogs are after it."

"After all, is it so very horrible here, Louis?" she whispered. "I think
it's been heaven. Our Castle, and the clearing--and next month my seeds
that Dr. Angus sent will be coming up. And the baby, Louis! Just think
of the millions of things we've got!"

But he knew better than she did the torment of his weakness and refused
to be comforted. He was near suicide that night; he too had been happy,
happier than ever in his tormented, unfriended life before. He had the
terrible torture of knowing that it was he who had brought the cloud
into their sky; he had the terror before him, with him, of knowing that
he would keep on bringing clouds, all the more black because they both
so loved the sunshine.

And she, when she undressed, sick and faint but comforted with the
thought that once more a fight was over, blew the light out quickly so
that he should not see the ugly purple mark of the pickaxe.

She usually slept with her nightgown unfastened so that the cool winds
should blow over her through the trellis of the window. To-night she
muffled herself up tightly, and when he came in from a strenuous ten
minutes in the lake, feeling once more as though she had sent him to dip
in Jordan, she pretended to be asleep. Seeing her so unusually wrapped
up, he thought she was cold, and fetched a blanket to cover her. She
dared not yield to her impulse to hold out her arms to him and draw his
aching head on to her breast for fear the bruise should grieve him.

CHAPTER XXV

Once more came peace, so sunlit and tender that it seemed as though they
had wandered into a valley of Avilion where even the echoes of storms
could not come, and doves brooded softly. They talked sometimes now of
the coming of their son; Louis, once he had got over his conventional
horror of such a proceeding