As he stood by the bed, looking down upon her, scenes and persons he had forgotten for years rushed back into the inner light of memory:—­that first day in Lebas’s atelier when he had seen her in her Holland overall, her black hair loose on her neck, the provocative brilliance of her dark eyes; their close comradeship in the contests, the quarrels, the ambitions of the atelier; her patronage of him as her junior in art, though her senior in age; her increasing influence over him, and the excitement of intimacy with a creature so unrestrained, so gifted, so consumed with jealousies, whether as an artist or a woman; his proposal of marriage to her in one of the straight roads that cut the forest of Compiegne; the ceremony at the Mairie, with only a few of their fellow students for witnesses; the little apartment on the Rive Gauche, with its bits of old furniture, and unframed sketches pinned up on the walls; Anna’s alternations of temper, now fascinating, now sulky, and that steady emergence in her of coarse or vulgar traits, like rocks in an ebbing sea; their early quarrels, and her old mother who hated him; their poverty because of her extravagance; his growing reluctance to take her to England, or to present her to persons of his own class and breeding in Paris, and her frantic jealousy and resentment when she discovered it; their scenes of an alternate violence and reconciliation and finally her disappearance, in the company, as he had always supposed, of Sigismondo Rocca, an Italian studying in Paris, whose pursuit of her had been notorious for some time.

The door opened gently, and Miss Alcott’s grey head appeared.

“The doctor!” she said, just audibly.

Buntingford followed her downstairs, and found himself presently in Alcott’s study, alone with a country doctor well known to him, a man who had pulled out his own teeth in childhood, had attended his father and grandfather before him, and carried in his loyal breast the secrets and the woes of a whole countryside.

They grasped hands in silence.

“You know who she is?” said Buntingford quietly.

“I understand that she tells Mr. Alcott that she was Mrs. Philip Bliss, that she left you fifteen years ago, and that you believed her dead?”

He saw Buntingford shrink.

“At times I did—­yes, at times I did—­but we won’t go into that.  Is she ill—­really ill?”

Ramsay spoke deliberately, after a minute’s thought: 

“Yes, she is probably very ill.  The heart is certainly in a dangerous state.  I thought she would have slipped away this morning, when they called me in—­the collapse was so serious.  She is not a strong woman, and she had a bad attack of influenza last week.  Then she was out all last night, wandering about, evidently in a state of great excitement.  It was as bad a fainting fit as I have ever seen.”

“It would be impossible to move her?”

“For a day or two certainly.  She keeps worrying about a boy—­apparently her own boy?”