they jumped; now they flew.  But just as the crisis was about to happen, something invariably slipped in her brain, so that the whole effort had to begin over again.  The heat was suffocating.  At last the faces went further away; she fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head.  She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head.  While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea.  There she lay, sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes light, while every now and then some one turned her over at the bottom of the sea.

After St. John had spent some hours in the heat of the sun wrangling with evasive and very garrulous natives, he extracted the information that there was a doctor, a French doctor, who was at present away on a holiday in the hills.  It was quite impossible, so they said, to find him.  With his experience of the country, St. John thought it unlikely that a telegram would either be sent or received; but having reduced the distance of the hill town, in which he was staying, from a hundred miles to thirty miles, and having hired a carriage and horses, he started at once to fetch the doctor himself.  He succeeded in finding him, and eventually forced the unwilling man to leave his young wife and return forthwith.  They reached the villa at midday on Tuesday.

Terence came out to receive them, and St. John was struck by the fact that he had grown perceptibly thinner in the interval; he was white too; his eyes looked strange.  But the curt speech and the sulky masterful manner of Dr. Lesage impressed them both favourably, although at the same time it was obvious that he was very much annoyed at the whole affair.  Coming downstairs he gave his directions emphatically, but it never occurred to him to give an opinion either because of the presence of Rodriguez who was now obsequious as well as malicious, or because he took it for granted that they knew already what was to be known.

“Of course,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders, when Terence asked him, “Is she very ill?”

They were both conscious of a certain sense of relief when Dr. Lesage was gone, leaving explicit directions, and promising another visit in a few hours’ time; but, unfortunately, the rise of their spirits led them to talk more than usual, and in talking they quarrelled.  They quarrelled about a road, the Portsmouth Road.  St. John said that it is macadamised where it passes Hindhead, and Terence knew as well as he knew his own name that it is not macadamised at that point.  In the course of the argument they said some very sharp things to each other, and the rest of the dinner was eaten in silence, save for an occasional half-stifled reflection from Ridley.

When it grew dark and the lamps were brought in, Terence felt unable to control his irritation any longer.  St. John went to bed in a state of complete exhaustion, bidding Terence good-night with rather more affection than usual because of their quarrel, and Ridley retired to his books.  Left alone, Terence walked up and down the room; he stood at the open window.