nurse--when you are strong
enough--who will take you across. Now I must go. Can you just tell me
first where the boy is?"

Almost inaudibly she gave an address in Kentish Town. He saw that she
could bear no more, and he rose.

"Try and sleep," he said in a voice that wavered. "I'll see you again
to-morrow. You're all right here."

She made no reply, and seemed again either asleep or unconscious.

As he stood by the bed, looking down upon her, scenes and persons he had
forgotten for years rushed back into the inner light of memory:--that
first day in Lebas's atelier when he had seen her in her Holland overall,
her black hair loose on her neck, the provocative brilliance of her dark
eyes; their close comradeship in the contests, the quarrels, the
ambitions of the atelier; her patronage of him as her junior in art,
though her senior in age; her increasing influence over him, and the
excitement of intimacy with a creature so unrestrained, so gifted, so
consumed with jealousies, whether as an artist or a woman; his proposal
of marriage to her in one of the straight roads that cut the forest of
Compiegne; the ceremony at the Mairie, with only a few of their fellow
students for witnesses; the little apartment on the Rive Gauche, with its
bits of old furniture, and unframed sketches pinned up on the walls;
Anna's alternations of temper, now fascinating, now sulky, and that
steady emergence in her of coarse or vulgar traits, like rocks in an
ebbing sea; their early quarrels, and her old mother who hated him; their
poverty because of her extravagance; his growing reluctance to take her
to England, or to present her to persons of his own class and breeding in
Paris, and her frantic jealousy and resentment when she discovered it;
their scenes of an alternate violence and reconciliation and finally her
disappearance, in the company, as he had always supposed, of Sigismondo
Rocca, an Italian studying in Paris, whose pursuit of her had been
notorious for some time.

The door opened gently, and Miss Alcott's grey head appeared.

"The doctor!" she said, just audibly.

Buntingford followed her downstairs, and found himself presently in
Alcott's study, alone with a country doctor well known to him, a man who
had pulled out his own teeth in childhood, had attended his father and
grandfather before him, and carried in his loyal breast the secrets and
the woes of a whole countryside.

They grasped hands in silence.

"You know who