But if Elsley had dreaded her knowledge of his story, he dreaded ten times more Tom’s knowledge of it.  What if Thurnall should tell Lucia?  What if Lucia should make a confidant of Thurnall?  Women told their doctors everything; and Lucia, he knew too well, had cause to complain of him.  Perhaps, thought he, maddened into wild suspicion by the sense of his own wrong-doing, she might complain of him; she might combine with Thurnall against him—­for what purpose he knew not:  but the wildest imaginations flashed across him, as he hurried desperately home, intending as soon as he got there to forbid Lucia’s ever calling in his dreaded enemy.  No, Thurnall should never cross his door again!  On that one point he was determined, but on nothing else.

However, his intention was never fulfilled.  For long before he reached home he began to feel himself thoroughly ill.  His was a temperament upon which mental anxiety acts rapidly and severely; and the burning sun, and his rapid walk, combined with rage and terror to give him such a “turn” that, as he hurried down the lane, he found himself reeling like a drunken man.  He had just time to hurry through the garden, and into his study, when pulse and sense failed him, and he rolled over on the sofa in a dead faint.

Lucia had seen him come in, and heard him fall, and rushed in.  The poor little thing was at her wits’ end, and thought that he had had nothing less than a coup-de-soleil. And when he recovered from his faintness, he began to be so horribly ill, that Clara, who had been called in to help, had some grounds for the degrading hypothesis (for which Lucia all but boxed her ears) that “Master had got away into the woods, and gone eating toadstools, or some such poisonous stuff;” for he lay a full half-hour on the sofa, death-cold, and almost pulseless; moaning, shuddering, hiding his face in his hands, and refusing cordials, medicines, and, above all, a doctor’s visit.

However, this could not be allowed to last.  Without Elsley’s knowledge, a messenger was despatched for Thurnall, and luckily met him in the lane; for he was returning to the town in the footsteps of his victim.

Elsley’s horror was complete, when the door opened, and Lucia brought in none other than his tormentor.

“My dearest Elsley, I have sent for Mr. Thurnall.  I knew you would not let me, if I told you; but you see I have done it, and now you must really speak to him.”

Elsley’s first impulse was to motion them both away angrily; but the thought that he was in Thurnall’s power stopped him.  He must not show his disgust.  What if Lucia were to ask its cause, even to guess it? for to his fears even that seemed possible.  A fresh misery!  Just because he shrank so intensely from the man, he must endure him!

“There is nothing the matter with me,” said he languidly.

“I should be the best judge of that, after what Mrs. Vavasour has just told me,” said Tom, in his most professional and civil voice; and slipped, catlike, into a seat beside the unresisting poet.