A few days later Monica had a sudden fit of illness.  Her marriage, and the long open-air holiday, had given her a much healthier appearance than when she was at the shop; but this present disorder resembled the attack she had suffered in Rutland Street.  Widdowson hoped that it signified a condition for which he was anxiously waiting.  That, however, did not seem to be the case.  The medical man who was called in asked questions about the patient’s mode of life.  Did she take enough exercise?  Had she wholesome variety of occupation?  At these inquiries Widdowson inwardly raged.  He was tormented with a suspicion that they resulted from something Monica had said to the doctor.

She kept her bed for three or four days, and on rising could only sit by the fireside, silent, melancholy.  Widdowson indulged his hope, though Monica herself laughed it aside, and even showed annoyance if he return to the subject.  Her temper was strangely uncertain; some chance word in a conversation would irritate her beyond endurance, and after an outburst of petulant displeasure she became obstinately mute.  At other times she behaved with such exquisite docility and sweetness that Widdowson was beside himself with rapture.

After a week of convalescence, she said one morning,—­

’Couldn’t we go away somewhere?  I don’t think I shall ever be quite well staying here.’

‘It’s wretched weather,’ replied her husband.

’Oh, but there are places where it wouldn’t be like this.  You don’t mind the expense, do you, Edmund?’

‘Expense?  Not I, indeed!  But—­were you thinking of abroad?’

She looked at him with eyes that had suddenly brightened.

’Oh! would it be possible?  People do go out of England in the winter.’

Widdowson plucked at his grizzled beard and fingered his watch-chain.  It was a temptation.  Why not take her away to some place where only foreigners and strangers would be about them?  Yet the enterprise alarmed him.

‘I have never been out of England,’ he said, with misgiving.

’All the more reason why we should go.  I think Miss Barfoot could advise us about it.  She has been abroad, I know, and she has so many friends.’

‘I don’t see any need to consult Miss Barfoot,’ he replied stiffly.  ‘I am not such a helpless man, Monica.’

Yet a feeling of inability to grapple with such an undertaking as this grew on him the more he thought of it.  Naturally, his mind busied itself with such vague knowledge as he had gathered of those places in the South of France, where rich English people go to escape their own climate:  Nice, Cannes.  He could not imagine himself setting forth to these regions.  Doubtless it was possible to travel thither, and live there when one arrived, without a knowledge of French; but he pictured all sorts of humiliating situations resulting from his ignorance.  Above everything he dreaded humiliation in Monica’s sight; it would be intolerable to have her comparing him with men who spoke foreign languages, and were at home on the Continent.