He was, therefore, out of Parliament and out of office; estranged from multitudes of old friends; his name besmirched by some of the most damaging accusations that can be brought against a man’s heart and honor.

He moved irritably among his cushions, trying to arrange them more comfortably.  This infernal pain!  It was to be hoped Nixon would be able to do more for it than that ass, the Dunscombe doctor.  Marsham thought, with resentment, of all his futile drugs and expedients.  According to the Dunscombe man, the stone had done no vital injury, but had badly bruised one of the lower vertebrae, and jarred the nerves of the spine generally.  Local rest, various applications, and nerve—­soothing drugs—­all these had been freely used, and with no result.  The pain had been steadily growing worse, and in the last twenty-four hours certain symptoms had appeared, which, when he first noticed them, had roused in Marsham a gust of secret terror; and Nixon, a famous specialist in nerve and spinal disease, had been summoned forthwith.

To distract his thoughts, Marsham took up the paper again.

What was wrong with the light?  He looked at the clock, and read it with some difficulty.  Close on four only, and the September sun was shining brightly outside.  It was his eyes, he supposed, that were not quite normal Very likely.  A nervous shock must, of course, show itself in a variety of ways.  At any rate, he found reading difficult, and the paper slid away.

The pain, however, would not let him doze.  He looked helplessly round the room, feeling depressed and wretched.  Why were his mother and Alicia out so long?  They neglected and forgot him.  Yet he could not but remember that they had both devoted themselves to him in the morning, had read to him and written for him, and he had not been a very grateful patient.  He recalled, with bitterness, the look of smiling relief with which Alicia had sprung up at the sound of the luncheon-bell, dropping the book from which she had been reading aloud, and the little song he had heard her humming in the corridor as she passed his door on her way down-stairs.

She was in no pain physical or mental, and she had probably no conception of what he had endured these six days and nights.  But one would have thought that mere instinctive sympathy with the man to whom she was secretly engaged.

For they were secretly engaged.  It was during one of their early drives, in the canvassing of the first election, that he had lost his head one June afternoon, as they found themselves alone, crossing a beech wood on one of the private roads of the Tallyn estate; the groom having been despatched on a message to a farm-house.  Alicia was in her most daring and provocative mood, tormenting and flattering him by turns; the reflections from her rose-colored parasol dappling her pale skin with warm color; her beautiful ungloved hands and arms, bare to the elbow, teasing