The heavy, heated atmosphere had proved too much for her, in her unhinged state of mind.  Captain Woolcot was extraordinarily upset by the occurrence; not one of his children had ever done such a thing before, and as Meg lay on the sofa, with her little fair head drooping against the red frilled cushions, her face white and unconscious, she looked strangely like her mother, whom he had buried out in the churchyard four years ago.  He went to the filter for a glass of water, and, as it trickled, wondered in a dull, mechanical kind of way if his little dead wife thought he had been too quick in appointing Esther to her kingdom.  And then, as he stood near the sofa and looked at the death-like face, he wondered with a cold chill at his heart whether Meg was going to die, too, and if so would she be able to tell the same little wife that Esther received more tenderness at his hands than she had done.

His reverie was interrupted by the doctor’s sharp, surprised voice.  He was talking to Esther, who had been hastily summoned to the scene, and who had helped to unfasten the pretty bodice.

“Why, the child is tight-laced!” he said; “surely you must have noticed it, madam.  That pressure, if it has been constant, has been enough to half kill her.  Chut, chut! faint indeed—­ I wonder she has not taken fits or gone into a decline before this.”

Then a cloud of trouble came over Esther’s beautiful face—­she had failed again in her duty.  Her husband was regarding her almost gloomily from the sofa, where the little figure lay in its crumpled muslin dress, and her heart told her these children were not receiving a mother’s care at her hands.

Afterwards, when Meg was safely in bed and the excitement all over, she went up to her husband almost timidly.

“I’m only twenty; Jack; don’t be too hard on me!” she said with a little sob in her voice.  “I can’t be all to them that she was, can I?”

He kissed the bright, beautiful head against his shoulder, and comforted her with a tender word or two.  But again and again that night there came to him Meg’s white, still face as it lay on the scarlet cushions, and he knew the wind that stirred the curtains at the window had been playing with the long grass in the churchyard a few minutes since.

CHAPTER X Bunty in the Light of a Hero

    “‘I know him to be valiant.’ 
     ‘I was told that by one that knows him better than you.’ 
     ‘What’s he?’
     ’Marry, he told the so himself, and he said he cared not who knew
      it’”