ning the
Countess. Gwen's voice is not unlike her mother's, only fuller. "They
are just going in to breakfast. The gong went a minute ago."

Now is his time to condemn the tyranny which keeps him in bed in the
morning and lying down all day. "I _could_ have got up and gone
downstairs, Mrs. Bailey, you know I could."

Mrs. Bailey pointed out that had this scheme been carried out a life
would have been sacrificed. She explained to a newcomer, no less a
person than the Earl himself, that Mr. Torrens would kill himself in
five minutes if she did not keep the eyes of a lynx on him all the
blessed day. She is always telling him so without effect, he never being
any the wiser, even when she talks her head off. Patients never are,
being an unmanageable class at the best. A nurse with her head on ought
to be a rarity, according to Mrs. Bailey.

The image of the Earl in the blind man's mind is very little helped by
recollection of the few occasions, some years ago, on which he has seen
him. It becomes now, after a short daily chat with him each morning
since he gained strength for interviews, that of an elderly gentleman
with a hesitating manner anxious to accommodate difficulties, soothing
an unreasonable race with a benevolent optimism, pouring oil on the
troubled waters of local religion and politics, taking no real interest
in the vortices into which it has pleased God to drag him, all with one
distinct object in view--that of adding to his collections undisturbed.
That is the impression he has produced on Mr. Adrian Torrens in a dozen
of his visits to his bedside. His lordship has made it a practice to
look in at his victim--for that is the way he thinks of him, will he
nill he!--as early every day as possible, and as late. He has suffered
agonies from constant longings to talk about his Amatis or his Elzevirs
or his Petitots, checked at every impulse by the memory of the patient's
blindness. He is always beginning to say how he would like to show him
this or that, and collapsing. This also is an inference of Mr. Torrens,
drawn in the dark, from sudden hesitations and changes of subject.

"How are we this morning, Nurse?" On the mend, it seems, being more
refractory than ever; always a good sign with patients. But we must be
kept in bed, till midday at any rate, for some days yet. Or weeks or
months or years according to the degree of our intractability. The Earl
accepts this as common form, and goes to the bedside saying