was as if the door had only
just clashed to after her when there came a repeated and violent ringing
at the bell, so that he jumped up himself, to answer it, without waiting
for the maid.

"Your wife--your wife!" panted the bell-boy, who stood there. "She's
hurt herself, and she's fainted."

"My wife? Where--how?" He ran down stairs after the boy, and in the
hallway on the ground floor he found Louise stretched upon the marble
pavement, with her head in the lap of a woman, who was chafing her
hands. He needed no look at this woman's face to be sure that it was the
woman of his wife's abhorrence, and he felt quite as sure that it was
the actress Yolande Havisham, from the effective drama of her
self-possession.

"Don't be frightened. Your wife turned her foot on the steps here. I
was coming into the house, and caught her from falling. It's only a
swoon." She spoke with the pseudo-English accent of the stage, but with
a Southern slip upon the vowels here and there. "Get some water,
please."

The hall-boy came running up the back stairs with some that he had gone
to get, and the woman bade Maxwell sprinkle his wife's face. But he
said: "No--you," and he stooped and took his wife's head into his own
hands, so that she might not come to in the lap of Mrs. Harley; in the
midst of his dismay he reflected how much she would hate that. He could
hardly keep himself from being repellant and resentful towards the
woman. In his remorse for quarrelling with Louise, it was the least
reparation he could offer her. Mrs. Harley, if it were she, seemed not
to notice his rudeness. She sprinkled Louise's face, and wiped her
forehead with the handkerchief she dipped in the water; but this did not
bring her out of her faint, and Maxwell began to think she was dead, and
to feel that he was a murderer. With a strange aesthetic vigilance he
took note of his sensations for use in revising Haxard.

The janitor of the building had somehow arrived, and Mrs. Harley said:
"I will go for a doctor, if you can get her up to your apartment;" and
she left Louise with the two men.

The janitor, a burly Irishman, lifted her in his arms, and carried her
up the three flights of steps; Maxwell followed, haggardly, helplessly.

On her own bed, Louise revived, and said: "My shoe--Oh, get it off!"

The doctor came a few minutes later, but Mrs. Harley did not appear with
him as Maxwell had dreaded she would. He decided that Mrs. Maxwell had
strained, not