Rachel jumped up and sprang away from the bed.

“Of course you’re not dying!” she reproached him.  “How can you imagine such things?”

Her heart suddenly hardened against him—­against his white-bandaged head and face, against his feeble voice of a beaten martyr.  It seemed to her disgraceful that he, a strong male creature, should be lying there damaged, helpless, and under the foolish delusion that he was dying.  She recalled with bitter gusto the tone in which the doctor had said, “He’s no more dying than I am!” All her fears that the doctor might be wrong had vanished away.  She now resented her husband’s illness; as a nurse, when danger is over, will resent a patient’s long convalescence, somehow charging it to him as a sin.

“I found the other half of the notes under the chair on the—­” Louis began again.

“Please!” she objected with quick resounding violence, and raised a hand.

He said—­

“You must listen.”

She answered, passionately—­

“I won’t listen!  I won’t listen!  And if you don’t stop I shall leave the room!  I shall leave you all alone!...  Yes, I shall!” She moved a little towards the door.

His gloomy and shifty glance followed her, and there was a short silence.

“You needn’t work yourself up into such a state,” murmured Louis at length.  “But I should like to know whether the scullery door was open or not, when you came downstairs that night?”

Rachel’s glance fell.  She blushed.  The tears had ceased to drop from her eyes.  She made no answer.

“You see,” said Louis, with a half-sneering triumph, “I knew jolly well it wasn’t open.  So did old Batchgrew know, too.”

She shut her lips together, went decisively to the mantelpiece, struck a match, and lit the stove.  Like the patent gas-burner downstairs, the stove often had to be extinguished after the first lighting and lighted again with a second and different kind of explosion.  And so it was now.  She flung down the match pettishly into the hearth.  Throughout the whole operation she sniffed convulsively, to prevent a new fit of sobbing.  Her peignoir being very near to the purple-green flames that folded themselves round the asbestos of the stove, she reflected that the material was probably inflammable, and that a careless movement might cause it to be ignited.  “And not a bad thing, either!” she said to herself.  Then, without looking at all towards the bed, she lit the spirit-lamp in order to make tea.  The sniffing continued, as she went through the familiar procedure.