t into the garden, as you noticed
perhaps.

"He was very feverish, and kept on muttering to himself. She sat on a
chair and looked at him fixedly across the table with her brown, blurred
eyes. 'Why don't you have him upstairs?' I asked. With a start and a
confused stammer she said, 'Oh! ah! I couldn't sit with him upstairs,
Sir.'

"I gave her certain directions; and going outside, I said again that
he ought to be in bed upstairs. She wrung her hands. 'I couldn't. I
couldn't. He keeps on saying something--I don't know what.' With the
memory of all the talk against the man that had been dinned into her
ears, I looked at her narrowly. I looked into her shortsighted eyes,
at her dumb eyes that once in her life had seen an enticing shape, but
seemed, staring at me, to see nothing at all now. But I saw she was
uneasy.

"'What's the matter with him?' she asked in a sort of vacant
trepidation. 'He doesn't look very ill. I never did see anybody look
like this before....'

"'Do you think,' I asked indignantly, 'he is shamming?'

"'I can't help it, sir,' she said stolidly. And suddenly she clapped
her hands and looked right and left. 'And there's the baby. I am
so frightened. He wanted me just now to give him the baby. I can't
understand what he says to it.'

"'Can't you ask a neighbour to come in tonight?' I asked.

"'Please, sir, nobody seems to care to come,' she muttered, dully
resigned all at once.

"I impressed upon her the necessity of the greatest care, and then had
to go. There was a good deal of sickness that winter. 'Oh, I hope he
won't talk!' she exclaimed softly just as I was going away.

"I don't know how it is I did not see--but I didn't. And yet, turning
in my trap, I saw her lingering before the door, very still, and as if
meditating a flight up the miry road.

"Towards the night his fever increased.

"He tossed, moaned, and now and then muttered a complaint. And she sat
with the table between her and the couch, watching every movement and
every sound, with the terror, the unreasonable terror, of that man she
could not understand creeping over her. She had drawn the wicker
cradle close to her feet. There was nothing in her now but the maternal
instinct and that unaccountable fear.

"Suddenly coming to himself, parched, he demanded a drink of water. She
did not move. She had not understood, though he may have thought he
was speaking in English. He waited, looking at her, burning with fever,
amazed