I haven't your nerve--it isn't likely that I should have. When I was
twenty-five, there was nothing in the world of which I was afraid."

She looked him over critically.

"Perhaps I am not so absolutely courageous as you think," she remarked.
"To tell you the truth, there are a good many things of which I am
afraid when you come to me in such a state. I am afraid of you, of what
you will do or say."

"You need not be," he assured her hastily. "When I am away from you, I
am dumb. What I suffer no one knows. I keep it to myself."

She nodded, a little contemptuously.

"I suppose you do your best," she declared. "Tell me, now, what is this
fresh thing which has disturbed you?"

Her visitor stared at her.

"Does there need to be any fresh thing?" he muttered.

"I suppose it is something about Wenham?" she asked.

The man shivered. He opened his lips and closed them again. The woman's
tone, if possible, grew colder.

"I hope you are not going to tell me that you have disobeyed my orders,"
she said.

"No," he protested, "no! I was there yesterday. I came back by the mail
from Penzance. I had to motor thirty miles to catch it."

"Something has happened, of course," she went on, "something which you
are afraid to tell 'me. Sit up like a man, my dear father, and let me
have the truth."

"Nothing fresh has happened at all," he assured her. "It is simply that
the memory of the day I spent at that place and that the sight of him
has got on my nerves till I can't sleep or think of anything else."

"What rubbish!" she exclaimed.

"You have only seen the place in fine weather," he continued, dropping
his voice a little. "Elizabeth, you have no idea what it is really like.
Yesterday morning I got out of the train at Bodmin and I motored through
to the village of Clawes. After that there were five miles to walk.
There's no road, only a sort of broken track, and for the whole of that
five miles there isn't even a farm building to be seen and I didn't meet
a human soul. There was a sort of pall of white-gray mists everywhere
over the moor, sometimes so dense that I couldn't see my way, and you
could stop and listen and there wasn't a thing to be heard, not even a
sheep bell."

She laughed softly..

"My dear, foolish father," she murmured, "you don't understand what
a rest cure is. This is quite all right, quite as it should be. Poor
Wenham has been seeing too many people all his life--that is why we have
to keep him