pressive countenance, ended with a supplicating smile and a glance
which contrived to be charged at once with pathos and coquetry. This
smile, this look, were so totally unlike any expression which Tims had
ever seen on Milly's countenance that they heightened her feeling of
nightmare. But she pulled herself together and determined to show
presence of mind. She had already placed a basket-chair by the fire
ready for her patient, and now gently but firmly led Milly to it.

"Sit down, Milly," she said--and the use of her friend's proper name
showed that she felt the occasion to be serious--"and don't speak again
till you've had some tea. Your head will be clearer presently, it's a
bit confused now, you know."

The stranger Milly, still so unlike the Milly of Tims's intimacy, far
from exerting the unnatural strength of a maniac, passively permitted
herself to be placed in the chair and listened to what Tims was saying
with the puzzled intentness of a child or a foreigner, trying to
understand. She laid her head back in its little cloud of amber hair,
and looked up at Tims, who, frowning portentously, once more with lifted
finger enjoined silence. Tims then concealing her agitation behind a
cupboard-door, reached down the tea-things. By some strange accident the
methodical Milly's teapot was absent from its place; a phenomenon for
which Tims was thankful, as it imposed upon her the necessity of leaving
her patient for a few minutes. Shaking her finger again at Milly still
more emphatically, she went out, and locked the door behind her. After a
moment's thought, she reluctantly decided to report the matter to Miss
Burt. But Miss Burt was closeted with the treasurer and an architect
from London, and was on no account to be disturbed. So Tims went up to
her own room and rapidly revolved the situation. She was certain that
Milly was not physically ill; on the contrary, she looked much better
than she had looked on the previous day. This curious affection of the
speech-memory might be hysterical, as her sobbing the night before had
been, or it might be connected with some little failure of circulation
in the brain; an explanation, perhaps, pointed to by the extraordinary
length of her sleep. Anyhow, Tims felt sceptical as to a doctor being of
any use.

She went to her cupboard to take out her own teapot, and her eye fell
upon a small medicine bottle marked "Brandy." Milly was a convinced
teetotaller; all the more reason, thoug