Bertha was still being taken in carefully prepared doses of an hour a day: from half-past four to a quarter to six. Any one else would have found this much of Bertha insupportable under any conditions. But Tarr’s eccentric soul had been used to such far greater doses that this was the minimum he considered necessary for a cure.

Tarr came to her every day with the regularity of an old gentleman at a German “Bad” taking his spring water at the regulation hour. But the cure was finishing. There were signs of a new robustness, (hateful to her) equivalent to a springy walk and a contented and sunny eye, that heralded departure. His daily visits, with their brutal regularity, did her as much harm as they did him good.

The news of Soltyk’s death, then Kreisler’s, affected the readily melodramatic side of her nature peculiarly. Death had made himself de la partie. Kreisler had left her alone for a few days. This is what had occupied him. The sensational news, without actually pushing her to imitation, made her own case, and her own tragic sensations, more real. They had received, in an indirect and cousin-th............