almost immediately, and for three days he had been anxiously ill.
Catherine, miserable, distrusting the local doctor, and not knowing how
to get hold of a better one, had never left him night or day. 'I had not
the heart to write even to you,' she wrote to her mother. 'I could think
of nothing but trying one thing after another. Now he has been in bed
eight days and is much better. He talks of getting up to-morrow, and
declares he must go home next week. I have tried to persuade him to stay
here another fortnight, but the thought of his work distresses him so
much that I hardly dare urge it. I cannot say how I dread the journey.
He is not fit for it in any way.'

Rose folded up the letter, her face softened to a most womanly gravity.
Hugh Flaxman paused a moment outside the door, his hands on his sides,
considering.

'I shall not go on to Scotland,' he said; 'Mrs. Elsmere must not be
left. I will go off there at once.'

In Rose's soberly-sweet looks as he left her, Hugh Flaxman saw for an
instant, with the stirring of a joy as profound as if was delicate, not
the fanciful enchantress of the day before, but his wife that was to
be. And yet she held him to his bargain. All that his lips touched as
he said good-by was the little bunch of yellow briar roses she gave him
from her belt.

Thirty hours later he was descending the long hill from Sassetot to
Petites Dalles. It was the first of September. A chilly west wind blew
up the dust before him and stirred the parched leafage of the valley. He
knocked at the door, of which the woodwork was all peeled and blistered
by the sun. Catherine herself opened it.

'This is kind--this is like yourself!' she said, after a first stare of
amazement, when he had explained himself. 'He is in there, much better.'

Robert looked up, stupefied, as Hugh Flaxman entered. But he sprang up
with his old brightness.

Well, this _is_ friendship! What on earth brings you here, old fellow?
Why aren't you in the stubbles celebrating St. Partridge?'

Hugh Flaxman said what he had to say very shortly, but so as to make
Robert's eyes gleam, and to bring his thin hand with a sort of caressing
touch upon Flaxman's shoulder.

'I shan't try to thank you--Catherine can if she likes. How relieved she
will be about that bothering journey of ours! However, I am really ever
so much better. It was very sharp while it lasted; and the doctor no
great shakes. But there never was such a woman as my wife; she