Louis inquired—­

“How do you know he’ll be here early?”

“He said he should—­because of the dressings, you know.”

She went to work on the room, producing a duster from somewhere, and ringing for Mrs. Tams, who, however, was not permitted to enter.  Louis hated these preparations for the doctor.  He had never in his life been able to understand why women were always so absurdly afraid of the doctor’s eye.  As if the doctor would care!  Moreover, the room was being tidied for the doctor, not for the invalid!  The invalid didn’t matter!  When she came to him with a bowl of water, soap, and a towel, he loathed the womanish scheme of being washed in bed.

“I’ll get up,” he said.  “I’m lots better.”  He had previously intended to feign extreme illness, but he forgot.

“Oh no, you won’t,” she replied coldly.  “First you think you’re dying, and then you think you’re all right.  You won’t stir out of that bed till the doctor’s been, at any rate.”

And she lodged the bowl dangerously between his knees.  He pretended to be contemptuous of her refusal to let him get up, but in fact he was glad of an excuse for not making good his boast.  His previous statement that he was very ill was much nearer to the truth than the fine talking about being “lots better.”  If not very ill, he was, at any rate, more ill than he now thought he was, and eating had fatigued him.  Nevertheless, he would wash his own hands.  Rachel yielded to him in this detail with cynical indifference.  She put the towel by the bowl, and left him to balance the bowl and keep the soap off the counterpane as best he could, while she rummaged in one of the drawers of the wardrobe—­obviously for the simple sake of rummaging.

Her unwifeliness was astounding; it was so astounding that Louis did not all at once quite realize how dangerously he was wounded by it.  He had seen that hard, contumelious mask on her face several times before; he had seen it, for instance, when she had been expressing her views on Councillor Batchgrew; but he had not conceived, in his absurd male confidence, that it would ever be directed against himself.  He could not snatch the mask from her face, but he wondered how he might pierce it, and incidentally hurt her and make her cry softly.  Ah!  He had seen her in moods of softness which were celestial to him—­surpassing all dreams of felicity!

The conviction of his own innocence and victimhood strengthened in him.  Amid the morbid excitations of the fear of death, he had forgotten that in strict truth he had not stolen a penny from his great-aunt, that he was utterly innocent.  He now vividly remembered that his sole intention in taking possession of the bank-notes had been to teach his great-aunt a valuable lesson about care in the guarding of money.  Afterwards he had meant to put the notes back where he had found them; chance had prevented; he had consistently acted for the best in very sudden difficulties, and after