o help her. Her hand was shaking.

"How silly of me to spill your tea. I'm so sorry. Let me pour it
back...."

"Rachel----" he began, but a servant entered with something and he
waited. When they were alone again, standing over her as though he were
afraid that she would escape him, he plunged.

"Rachel dear. We're talking as though we'd never met before. You've
never been shy with me like this. If marriage is going to make a
stranger of you, I shall break young Seddon's neck----"

"No," she said in a voice that was between laughter and tears. "Of
course, Dr. Chris. Things are just the same between us, only,
only--well, I'm married and--one thing and another, you know."

He caught both her hands.

"You're perfectly happy?"

She met his eyes.

"Perfectly."

"Happier than you've ever been in your life?"

She dropped her eyes.

"Happier than I've ever been in my life."

"And you'll come to me just the same if there's any kind of trouble?"

"Of course."

"You promise?"

"I promise."

They talked then, for a little time, of other things. But he was not
satisfied. Rachel's soul, caught away in alarm, was still beyond his
grasp.

At last, feeling that the moments were precious and that Roddy might at
any instant appear, he sat down on the sofa beside her.

"Rachel dear. Something's worrying you. You won't tell me?"

"Nothing's worrying----"

"Ah, but I know--well, if you won't you won't--but if you knew how much
I loved you you'd feel that you were cruel not to let me help you."

"_Dear_ Dr. Chris--but there is _nothing_."

But her eyes were full of tears.

"Look here," he said. "Perhaps you'll feel later on you can talk to me.
Just come straight away if you do feel that."

He went on. "Don't be frightened, my dear, if there are a whole heap of
new emotions, new instincts, stirred in you by marriage. Just take them
all as they come. It's all progress, you know. Don't be frightened of
anything. Just take the animal by the head and look at it."

That led him to speak about Brun's Tiger. He explained it--the force in
people, the way they either grappled with the creature, and at last
trained it to help them with their work in the world, or ignored it,
silenced it, allowed it at last to die, and so, cosy and lazily
comfortable, passed to their day's end, but had, nevertheless, missed
the whole purpose of life.

He enlarged on that and showed the connection of the individual Tiger
with the welfar