“Do you wish me to be frank, and do you mean the two sermons?”

She hesitated for an instant.  Then she said: 

“I do mean the sermons, and I do wish you to be frank.”

“I thought Mr. Chichester’s sermon very remarkable indeed.”

“And my husband’s sermon?”

Her lips twisted almost as if with contempt when she said the words, “my husband’s.”

“Why doesn’t Mr. Harding take a long rest?” said Malling, speaking conventionally, a thing that he seldom did.

“You think he needs one?”

“He has a tiresome malady, I understand.”

“What malady?”

“Doesn’t he suffer very much from nervous dyspepsia?”

She looked at him with irony, which changed almost instantly into serious reflection.  But the irony returned.

“Now and then he has a touch of it,” she said.  “Very few of us don’t have something.  But we have to go on, and we do go on, nevertheless.”

“I think a wise doctor would probably order your husband away,” said Malling, though Mr. Harding’s departure was the last thing he desired just then.

“Even if he were ordered away, I don’t know that he would go.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think he would.  I don’t feel as if he could get away,” she said, with what seemed to Malling a sort of odd obstinacy.  “In fact, I know he’s not going,” she abruptly added.  “I have an instinct.”

Malling felt sure that she had considered, perhaps long before he had suggested it, this very project of Mr. Harding’s departure for a while for rest, and that she had rejected it.  Her words recalled to his mind some other words of her husband, spoken in Mr. Harding’s study:  “Surely one ought to get out of such an atmosphere, to get out of it, and to keep out of it.  But how extraordinary it is the difficulty men have in getting away from things!”

Perhaps Lady Sophia was right.  Perhaps the rector could not get away from the atmosphere which seemed to be destroying him.

“I dare say he is afraid to trust everything to his curates,” observed Malling, prosaically.

“He needn’t be—­now,” she replied.

In that “now,” as she said it, there lay surely a whole history.  Malling understood that Lady Sophia, suddenly perhaps, had given her husband up.  Since Malling had first encountered her she had cried, "Le roi est mort!" in her heart.  The way she had just uttered the word “now” made Malling wonder whether she was not about to utter the supplementary cry, "Vive le roi!"

As he looked at her, with this wonder in his mind, Henry Chichester came into the room.