Mrs. Lake was better. The bleeding was stopped, the doctor gone, and she seemed comfortable. There was less danger than Miss Jupp had supposed, for the blood-vessel which had broken proved to be only a small one on the chest--not the lungs. To her husband it appeared incomprehensible that she should be in any danger at all: his mind had never admitted the possibility of it.

He was all alive to it now. As long as she lay in bed he scarcely left her chamber. To talk with her much was not allowed, but he sat there, holding her hand, looking into her eyes with the old love in his. What his reflections were, or how great his self-reproaches, was best known to himself. When these men, essentially kind and tender by nature, have to indulge in such remorse, be assured it is not very light. He could not bring himself to believe that any conduct of his had contributed to his wife\'s illness; still less that he had caused it. That was a flight of fancy not easy to him to understand; but he saw now how ill she must have been all along, and bitterly regretted that he had left her so much alone. Rather than have wilfully ill-treated her, he would have forfeited his life. His love had come back to him, now that it was too late--it may be more appropriate to say his senses had come back to him.

In a day or two she grew so much better that she was allowed to leave her bed for a small sitting-room on the same floor, carried into it by him. Late in the afternoon, he left her comfortably lying back in the easy chair, and inclined to sleep. Taking his hat, he walked out.

His errand was to the doctor. His wife seemed to assume that she should not recover; Miss Jupp and the servants the same; for all he saw, she might be well in a week or two: and he went to put the question. Dr. Marlow had said nothing particular to him of her state, one way or the other, and he could not question him before his wife.

Dr. Marlow was at home, and came to him at once. The two families had been very intimate; on familiar terms one with the other. Mr. Lake plunged into the matter at once, speaking of the danger other people seemed to apprehend, and of his own inability to see it.

"Is she, or is she not, in peril?" he asked. "Tell me the plain truth."

The old man laid his hand upon the speaker\'s shoulder. "What if the truth should be painful? Will you hear it--the whole of it?"

"I am come to hear it."

"Then I can only tell you that she is in danger; and I fear that a little time will see the end."

Very rapidly beat his pulses as he listened. Repentant pulses. A whole lifetime of repentance seemed, in that moment, to be in every one of them.

"But what is killing her? What is it?"

"The primary cause is of course that cold she caught at Guild. It laid hold of her system. Still, I think she might have rallied: many a time, since she came home, I have deemed her all but well again. You ought to know best, Master Robert, but to me it appears as though she had some grievance on her mind, and that it has been working mischief. I hope you have been a good husband to her, as Joan says to Hodge," added the doctor, turning from Mr. Lake to take a pinch of snuff. "Your wife has possessed one of those highly sensitive, rarely-refined temperaments, that, when joined to a fragile body, an unkind blow would shatter. I once told you this."

He made no comment; he was battling with his pain. Dr. Marlow continued.

"The body was a healthy body; there was no inherent disease, as I have always believed, and I cannot see why it should not have recovered; but the mind seemed to pull it back; two powers, one working against the other. Between them they have conquered, and will lay her low."

"Do you call it consumption?" Mr. Lake jerked out. And really the words were jerked out, rather than fairly spoken.

"Decidedly not. More of a decline: a waste of the system."

"Those declines are cured sometimes."

"Not often: when they fairly set in."

"Oh, doctor," he cried, clasping the old man\'s hand, and giving vent to some of the anguish that was rending him, "try and save her! Save her for my sake! You don\'t know the cause I have to ask it."

"I wish I could--for both your sakes. She is beyond earthly aid."

They stood looking at each other. Dr. Marlow, willing if possible to soothe in a degree the blow, resumed.

"I suppose I must, after all, have been mistaken in her constitution. When consumption showed itself in her brother, and he died of it, I watched her all the closer. But I could detect nothing wrong: though she was always one of those blossoms that a sharp wind would blow away. The disease was there, we must assume, and I failed to detect it."

"You say--you said but now--that it is not consumption," returned Mr. Lake, speaking sharply in his pain.

"Neither is it. But when unsoundness is inherent in the constitution it does not always show itself in the same form. Sometimes it comes out in one shape, sometimes in another."

There was no more to be said; nothing further to be learnt. Mr. Lake returned home with his burden of knowledge, wondering how much of this dread fiat Clara suspected, how much not. The shades of evening were on the room when he entered it, imparting to it a semi-gloom, but the rays of the fire-light fell on his wife\'s wasted face. Stirring the coals into a bright blaze, he sat down by her chair, and took her hand Her wasted fingers entwined themselves fondly with his.

"I know where you have been, Robert. And I guess for what purpose."

"Ah. You are wise, my little wife. I went out to get a breath of fresh air."

"You have been to Dr. Marlow\'s. Margaret Jupp called, and she said she saw you turn into his house. You went to ask him whether I should get well. He told you No: for he knows I shall not. Was it not so?"

She leaned a little forward to look at him. He suddenly clasped her to his breast with a gush of passionate tenderness, and his hot tears fell upon her face.

"Oh, my darling! my darling!"

"It must be," she softly whispered. "There is no appeal against it now."

"Clara, if we are indeed to part, at least let perfect confidence be restored between us," he resumed, controlling his emotion with an effort. "What is the trouble that has been upon you?"

"The trouble?"

"Some of them are hinting at such a thing," he said, thinking of the doctor and of Miss Jupp: "I must know from you what it is."

"Need you ask?"

"Yes. For I cannot comprehend it. My darling, you must tell me."

"If she had never come between us, I do not think I should have been ill now."

"I cannot understand it," he repeated, a wailing sound in his emphasized words. "I have been foolish, thoughtless, wrong: though not to the extent you may possibly have imagined. But surely, taking it at its worst, that was not cause sufficient to bring you to death."

"Your love left me for another. It seemed to me--it seemed to me--more than I could bear."

Partly from the agitation the topic called up, partly that she was in hesitation how to frame her words, the pauses came. It was as if she would fain have said more.

"My love? oh no. It was but a passing--" the word at his tongue\'s end was "fancy," but he substituted another--"folly. Clara! do not give me more than my share of blame; that will be heavy enough, Heaven knows. The old man says that the violent cold you caught at Guild, was the primary cause of decay: surely that cannot be charged upon me."

She was silent a few moments--but, as he had said, there ought to be full confidence between them now--and she had been longing to tell him the whole unreserved truth; a longing that had grown into a sick yearning.

"I will tell you now how I caught that cold. Do you remember the night?"

"Not particularly." He was of a forgetful nature, and the events of the night had only been those of many another.

"Don\'t you remember it? When you were walking with--her--in the shrubbery in the raw twilight.--"

Mr. Lake slightly shook his head in the pause she made. Twilight shrubbery walks were lying in numbers on his conscience.

"She complained of cold, and you went to get her shawl out of the summer-house, leaving her seated on the bench in front of the green alcove. She sang a song to herself: I think I could repeat its words now. You brought the shawl and folded it lovingly around her, and kissed her afterwards, and called her--"

In great astonishment he raised his wife\'s face to gaze into it. Where had she learnt that little episode? Had she dreamt it? He did not ask: he only stared at her.

She bent down her head again to its resting-place, and folded her arm round him in token of forgiveness. "And called her \'My dearest.\' I was standing there, Robert, behind the bench. I saw and heard all."

Not a word spoke he. He hardly dared to accept the loving sign of pardon, or to press her to him. Had she glanced up she would have seen his face in a hot glow. These little private episodes may be very gratifying in the passing, but it is uncommonly disagreeable to find out that your wife has made a third at them.

"It was very thoughtless of me to run out from the heated room on that cold damp night without anything on," she resumed hastily, as if conscious of the feeling and wishing to cover it "But oh! I was so unhappy--scarcely, I think, in my senses. I thought you had not returned from Guild: Fanny came in and said you had been home a long while and were with her. An impulse took me that I would go and see: I never did such a thing in my life; never, never, before or since: and I opened the glass doors and went out. I was half way down the shrubbery when I heard you coming into it from a cross walk, and I darted into the green alcove, and stood back to hide myself; not to spy upon you."

She paused, but was not interrupted. Mrs. Lake began to hurry over her tale.

"So you see that, in a measure, she was the cause of the cold which struck to me. And then I was laid up; and many a time when you deemed I should fancy you were out shooting, or had gone to Guild, or something or other, you were with her. I knew it all. And since we came home, you have been ever restless to go to her--leaving me alone--even on Christmas-day."

Ay: even on Christmas-day. He almost gnashed his teeth, in his self-condemnation. She, with her impassioned and entire love for him, with her rare and peculiar temperament that, as the doctor had observed, a rude blow would destroy! The misery of mind reacting upon a wasted frame! He no longer wondered why she was dying.

"Why could you not speak out and tell me this?"

"But that the world seems to have nearly passed away from me, and that earthly passions--pride, self-reticence, shame, I mean the shame of betraying one\'s dearest feelings, are over--I could not tell you now."

"But don\'t you see the bed of remorse you have made for me? Had I suspected the one quarter of what you tell me you felt, the woman might have gone to the uttermost ends of the earth, for me. I wish you had spoken."

"It might not have prevented it. My belief is that it would not. It was to be."

Mr. Lake looked at her.

"You remember the dream: how it shadowed forth that I was to meet, in some way, my death through going to Mrs. Chester\'s."

"Child! Can you still dwell upon that dream?"

"Yes. And so will you when the hearse comes here to take me away. Never was a dream more completely worked out. Not quite yet: it will be shortly. I have something else to tell you; about it and her."

Mr. Lake passed his hand across his brow. It seemed to him that he had heard enough already.

"The very first moment, when I met Lady Ellis at your sister\'s, her eyes puzzled me: those strange, jet-black eyes. I could not think where I had seen them. They seemed to be familiar to my memory, and I thought and thought in vain, even when the weeks went on. On this same night that we are speaking of, I alarmed you by my looks. Mrs. Chester happened to look at me as I sat by the fire; she called out; and you, who were at chess with--with her, came up. You all came round me. I was shaking, and my cheeks were scarlet, somebody exclaimed: I believe you thought I was seized with an ague-fit. Robert, I was shaking with fear, with undefined dread: for an instant before, as I sat looking at her eyes, it flashed into my mind whose eyes they were."

"Well, whose?" he asked, for she paused.

"They were those of the man who drove the hearse in my dream," she whispered in an awestruck tone. "The very same. You must recollect my describing them to you when I awoke: \'strangely black eyes, the blackest eyes I ever saw,\' though of his face I retained no impression. It was singular it should have struck upon me then, when I had been for weeks trying unsuccessfully to get the thread of the mystery."

"Oh Clara, my darling, these superstitious feelings are very sad!" he remonstrated. "You ought not to indulge them."

"Will you tell me how I could have avoided them? It was not my fault that the dream came to me: or that the eyes of the driver were her eyes: or that my death had been induced through goin............