FOR two whole weeks—strange cataclysm in the Archinard household—Hilda stayed in bed really ill. Taylor waited on her with an indignant devotion that implied, by contrast, worlds of repressed antagonism; for Taylor had highly disapproved of her trip with Katherine, and when she announced to Hilda on the day after the great catastrophe that Katherine had returned to England, she added with emphasis—

“But I don’t go this time, Miss Hilda. It’s your turn to have a maid now.”

The news took a weight of dread from Hilda’s heart. She shrank from again seeing her own guilt looking at her from Katherine’s tragic eyes. She did not need Katherine to impress it; during long days and dim, half delirious nights it haunted her, the awful sense of irremediable wrong, of everlasting responsibility for her sister’s misery. With all the capability for self-torture, only possessed by the most finely tempered natures, she scourged her memory again and again through that blighting hour when she had appealed for and confessed a love that had dishonored her. She dwelt with sickening on the moment when she had said: “I love you, too!” Her conscience, fanatically unbalanced, distorted it with cruellest self-injustice. Indeed, such moments in life are difficult of analysis; the unconsciously spoken words followed by a consciousness so swift that in perspective they merge. In periods of clearer moral visions she could place her barrier, but only for mere flashes of relief, turned from with agony, as the dreadful fact of Katherine’s ruined love surged over all and made of day and night one blackness.

Hilda’s love for Odd now told her that for months past it had been growing from the child’s devotion, and, with the new torture of a hopeless longing upon her—for which she despised herself—she saw in the whole scene with him the base self-betrayal of a lovesick heart.

Only a few days after Katherine’s departure, the Captain returned.

Hilda felt, as he would come in and look at her lying there with that weird sense of distance upon her, that her father was changed. He walked carefully in and out on the tips of the Archinard toes, and, outside the door, she could hear him talking in tones of fretful anxiety on her behalf.

He hardly mentioned Katherine’s broken engagement, and, for once in her life, Hilda was an object of consideration for her family. Even Mrs. Archinard rose from her sofa on more than one occasion to sit plaintively beside her daughter’s bed; and it was from her that Hilda learned that they were going back to Allersley.

Her father, then, must have enough money to pay mortgages and debts, and Hilda lay with closed eyes while her forebodings leaped to possibilities and to probabilities. The Captain’s good fortune showed to her in a dismal light of material dependence, and she could guess miserably at its source. She could guess who encompassed her feeble life with care, and who it was that shielded her from even a feather’s weight of gratitude—for the Captain made no mention of his good luck.

“Yes, we are going back to the Priory,” Mrs. Archinard said, her melancholy eyes resting almost reproachfully upon her daughter’s wasted face. “It would be pleasant were it not that fate takes care to compensate for any sweet by an engulfing bitter. Katherine to jilt Mr. Odd, and you so dangerously ill, Hilda. I do not wonder at it, I predicted it rather. You have killed yourself tout simplement; I consider it a simple case of suicide. Ah, yes, indeed! The doctor thinks it very, very serious. No vitality, complete exhaustion. I said to him, ‘Docteur, elle s’est tuée.’ I said it frankly.”

Mrs. Archinard found another invalid rather confusing. She had for so long contemplated one only, that, insensibly, she adopted the same tones of pathos and pity on Hilda’s behalf, hardly realizing their objective nature.

By the beginning of May they were once more in Allersley. It was like returning to a prior state of existence, and Hilda, lying in a wicker chair on the lawn, looked at the strange familiarity of the trees, the meadows, the river between its sloping banks of smooth green turf, and felt like a ghost among the unchanged scenes of her childhood.

Mrs. Archinard found out, bit by bit, that it was tiresome to keep her sofa now that there was an opposition faction on the lawn; she realized, too, to a certain extent, what it was that Hilda had been to that sofa existence; without the background of Hilda’s quiet servitude, it became flat and flavorless, and Mrs. Archinard arose and actually walked, and for longer periods every day, drifting about the house and garden in pensive contemplation of tenants’ havoc. She sighed over the Priory and said it had changed very much, but, characteristically, she did not think of asking how the Priory had come to them again. The Captain vouchsafed no hint. He went rather sulkily through his day, fished a little—the Captain had no taste for a pleasure as inexpensive as fishing—and read the newspapers with ejaculations of disgust at political follies.

When Hilda sat in the sunshine near the river, her father often walked aimlessly in her neighborhood, eyeing her with almost embarrassed glances, always averted hastily if her eyes met his. Hilda had submitted passively to all the material changes of her life; she saw them only vaguely, concentrated on that restless inner torture. But one day, as her father lingered indeterminately around her, switching his fishing-rod, looking hastily into his fishing-basket, and showing evident signs of perplexity and indecision very clumsily concealed, a sudden thought of her own egotistic self-absorption struck her, and a sudden sense of method underlying the Captain’s man?uvres.

“Papa, come and sit down by me a little while. I am sure the fish will be glad of a respite. Isn’t it a little sunny to-day for first-class fishing?” Hilda pointed to the chair near hers, and the Captain came up to her with shy alacrity.

“Even first-class fishing is a bore, I think,” he observed, not taking the chair, but laying his rod upon it, and looking at his daughter and then at the river.

“Feeling better to-day, aren’t you? You might take a stroll with me, perhaps; but no, you’re not strong enough for that, are you? Fine day, isn’t it?”

Now that the moment looked forward to, yet dreaded, might be coming, the Captain vaguely tried to avert it after the procrastinating manner of weak people. Hilda did not seem to have anything particular to say, and the absen............