He was to be away one night—­starting at four in the morning he would rest at the hotel for the night and start back next morning.  That night Marcella lay long awake, thinking about him.  She was vaguely anxious; when she fell asleep she dreamed that he came home to Castle Lashcairn drunk.  He was talking French—­his eyes were wild, his mouth loose and slobbering, his tongue bitter.

She started up in fright and rolled out of the hammock.

“No—­no.  It couldn’t happen again.  It couldn’t.  We could never live now, if we were to get miserable like that after we’ve been so happy.  He’s so—­so clean, now.  He can’t get dirty again.”

She could not sleep after that, and walked down to the lake in the moonlight.  She was really feeling ill.  Louis’s lectures and diagrams and descriptions of “midder” cases at the hospital sickened and frightened her.  Mrs. Twist, with the average woman’s unscientific and morbid interest in such illness, sickened her still more.

The moonlight was very bright; the weather was warm, for May.  Louis had begged her not to swim now.  She had given in to him rather than worry him, but a sudden impulse to do what she thought pleasant without troubling him came to her, and she slipped out of her nightgown quickly.  The lake lay at her feet, a shimmering pool of silver, almost without ripples.  It lapped very gently against her feet, bringing back the softly lapping waters of Lashnagar on spring mornings.  It was adorably, tinglingly cold; she forgot the dream in the exhilaration and gave a little cry of rapture as she waded further out.  Then, without warning, a ghost was in the water beside her.  She stared, and knew that it was her own reflection.  With a little cry she hurried back to land, her heart thumping wildly as she pulled on her nightgown over her wet body with trembling hands.

“How horrible I look!” she whispered.  “He mustn’t know I look as awful as that!”

The next day she waited for him, anxious to unpack the thrilling parcel from Sydney, but he did not come, and all the night she sat waiting, afraid that he had met with some accident.  If someone had come, then, and told her he was drunk she would not have believed it.  It seemed to her just as unreal a thing as last night’s dream.

But at four o’clock in the morning as she sat on the verandah, half nodding with red-rimmed, heavy eyes, she saw him come stumbling along, holding on to the pony’s neck.

She went out to meet him, knowing just exactly what she was going to meet.  And she felt frozen with horror.  The average man coming home drunk is not a tragedy.  He is merely amiably ridiculous.  To Louis, after all his fights and all his hopes, tragedy had certainly come, but he was too drunk to know it yet.  He began to bluff and lie just as usual.

“Ought be ’shamed, sending a chap thirty—­thirty—­thirty miles f’r lot fem’—­fem’—­fripp—­fripp—­fripperies!  Sick an’ tired, stuck in with a wom’ day an’ night f’r months.  ’Nough make any man k-k-kick.”