“Oh, Christie!  I’m so easily led.  I am too great a fool to live.  Kill me!”

And she kneeled down, and renewed the request, looking up in his face with an expression that might have disarmed Cain ipsum.

He smiled superior.  “The question is, are you sorry you have been so thoughtless?”

“Yes, dear.  Oh! oh!”

“Will you be very good to make up?”

“Oh, yes.  Only tell me how; for it does not come natural to poor me.”

“Keep out of those women’s way for the rest of the season.”

“I will.”

“Bring your stays home, and allow me to do what I like with them.”

“Of course.  Cut them in a million pieces.”

“Till you are recovered, you must be my patient, and go nowhere without me.”

“That is no punishment, I am sure.”

“Punishment!  Am I the man to punish you?  I only want to save you.”

“Well, darling, it won’t be the first time.”

“No; but I do hope it will be the last.”

CHAPTER XI.

“Sublata causa tollitur effectus.”  The stays being gone, and dissipation moderated, Mrs. Staines bloomed again, and they gave one or two unpretending little dinners at the Bijou.  Dr. Staines admitted no false friends to these.  They never went beyond eight; five gentlemen, three ladies.  By this arrangement the terrible discursiveness of the fair, and man’s cruel disposition to work a subject threadbare, were controlled and modified, and a happy balance of conversation established.  Lady Cicely Treherne was always invited, and always managed to come; for she said, “They were the most agweeable little paaties in London, and the host and hostess both so intewesting.”  In the autumn, Staines worked double tides with the pen, and found a vehicle for medical narratives in a weekly magazine that did not profess medicine.

This new vein put him in heart.  His fees, towards the end of the year, were less than last year, because there was no hundred-guinea fee; but there was a marked increase in the small fees, and the unflagging pen had actually earned him two hundred pounds, or nearly.  So he was in good spirits.

Not so Mrs. Staines; for some time she had been uneasy, fretful, and like a person with a weight on her mind.

One Sunday she said to him, “Oh, dear, I do feel so dull.  Nobody to go to church with, nor yet to the Zoo.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Staines.

“You will!  To which?”

“To both; in for a penny, in for a pound.”

So to church they went; and Staines, whose motto was “Hoc age,” minded his book.  Rosa had intervals of attention to the words, but found plenty of time to study the costumes.

During the Litany in bustled Clara, the housemaid, with a white jacket on so like her mistress’s, that Rosa clutched her own convulsively, to see whether she had not been skinned of it by some devilish sleight-of-hand.