that as there was evidently something unusual in the case nothing should be said to anybody outside the house till I came back and she was able to talk to us.  I hurried back, and found the doctor giving injections of strychnine and brandy which seemed to be reviving her.  While we were all standing round her, she said quite clearly—­’I want to see Philip Buntingford.’  Dr. Ramsay knelt down beside her, and asked her to tell him, if she was strong enough, why she wanted to see you.  She did not open her eyes, but said again distinctly—­’Because I am’—­or was—­I am not quite sure which—­’his wife.’  And after a minute or two she said twice over, very faintly—­’Send for him—­send for him.’  So then I wrote my note to you and sent it off.  Since then the doctor and my sister have succeeded in carrying her upstairs—­and the doctor gives leave for you to see her.  He is coming back again presently.  During her sleep, she talked incoherently once or twice about a lake and a boat—­and once she said—­’Oh, do stop that music!’ and moved her head about as though it hurt her.  Since then I have heard some gossip from the village about a strange lady who was seen in the park last night.  Naturally one puts two and two together—­but we have said nothing yet to anyone.  Nobody knows that she—­if the woman seen in the park, and the woman upstairs are the same—­is here.”

He looked interrogatively at his companion.  But Buntingford, who had risen, stood dumb.

“May I go upstairs?” was all he said.

The rector led the way up a small cottage staircase.  His sister, a grey-haired woman of rather more than middle age, spectacled and prim, but with the eyes of the pure in heart, heard them on the stairs and came out to meet them.

“She is quite ready, and I am in the next room, if you want me.  Please knock on the wall.”

Buntingford entered and shut the door.  He stood at the foot of the bed.  The woman lying on it opened her eyes, and they looked at each other long and silently.  The face on the pillow had still the remains of beauty.  The powerful mouth and chin, the nose, which was long and delicate, the deep-set eyes, and broad brow under strong waves of hair, were all fused in a fine oval; and the modelling of the features was intensely and passionately expressive.  That indeed was at once the distinction and, so to speak, the terror of the face,—­its excessive, abnormal individualism, its surplus of expression.  A woman to fret herself and others to decay—­a woman, to burn up her own life, and that of her lover, her husband, her child.  Only physical weakness had at last set bounds to what had once been a whirlwind force.

“Anna!” said Buntingford gently.

She made a feeble gesture which beckoned him to come nearer—­to sit down—­and he came.  All the time he was sharply, irrelevantly conscious of the little room, the bed with its white dimity furniture, the texts on the distempered walls, the head of the Leonardo Christ over the mantelpiece, the white muslin dressing-table, the strips of carpet on the bare boards, the cottage chairs:—­the spotless cleanliness and the poverty of it all.  He saw as the artist, who cannot help but see, even at moments of intense feeling.