not feel herself secure.
Pertinaciously and blandly she insisted to the doctor that Frau Lippheim
was now quite well enough to make a short sea voyage. She would secure
the best of yachts and the best of trained nurses, and a little voyage
would be the very thing for her. The doctor was recalcitrant, and Madame
von Marwitz was in terror lest, during the moments they spent by her
bedside, Karen should burst forth in a sudden appeal to him.

A change for the worse, very much for the worse, had, he said, come over
his patient. He was troubled and perplexed. "Has anything happened to
disturb her?" he asked in the little sitting-room, and something in his
chill manner reminded her unpleasantly of Gregory Jardine;--"her
husband's sudden departure?"

Madame von Marwitz felt it advisable, then, to take the doctor into her
confidence. He grew graver as she spoke. He looked at her with eyes more
scrutinizing, more troubled and more perplexed. But, reluctantly, he saw
her point. The unfortunate young woman upstairs, a fugitive from her
husband, must be spared the shock of a possible brutal encounter.
Perhaps, in a day or two, it might be possible to move her. She could be
taken in her bed to Southampton and carried on board the yacht.

Madame von Marwitz wired at once and secured the yacht.

It was after this interview with the doctor, after the sending of the
wire, that she mounted the staircase to Karen's room with the most
difficult part of her task still before her. She had as yet not openly
broached to Karen the question of what the immediate future should be.
She approached it now by a circuitous way, seating herself near Karen's
bed and unfolding and handing to her a letter she had that morning
received from Franz. It was a letter she could show. Franz was in
Germany.

"The dear Franz. The good Franz," Madame von Marwitz mused, when Karen
had finished and her weak hand dropped with the letter to the sheet. "No
woman had ever a truer friend than Franz. You see how he writes, Karen.
He will never trouble you with his hopes."

"No; Franz will never trouble me," said Karen.

"Poor Franz," Madame von Marwitz repeated. "He will be seen by the world
as a man who refuses to marry his mistress when she is freed."

"I am not his mistress," said Karen, who, for all her apathy, could show
at moments a disconcerting vehemence.

"You will be thought so, my child."

"Not by him," said Karen.

"No; not by him," Madame von Marw