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to be a wife first.” He looked up at her with over-bright, gleaming eyes, and she was afraid his temperature was mounting again. “I’d like to take it off myself, and cast it into the sea from a very high cliff top. Are there any cliffs near here?”
    She felt worried. He was talking nonsense.
    “The sea is twenty miles from here.”
    “Too far. Much, much too far away...”
    He closed his eyes, and she noticed that his eyelashes lay very still on his cheeks, and he was still unshaved because apparently he hadn’t felt up to shaving himself, and even Mrs. Davenport was not competent to do that. His grasp of her fingers was surprisingly strong, so he couldn’t have fallen asleep.
    Gently she tried to detach her fingers, but he gripped them more tightly.
    “They’re cool,” he said, “cool and soft...”

CHAPTER V
    FOR the next few days life at Leydon Hall pursued a course that had been unfamiliar to it for years. The master lay in the dressing-room of the master suite, and the interest of everyone in the house and near to it was centred round him.
    The late Sir Francis had seldom, if ever, stayed at Leydon, although he had visited it often, so it was something to have the man who was responsible for paying the wages of a generous-sized contingent who represented the outdoor staff actually in residence in the house, and many were the enquiries that were received about him. Mr. Minty, recovering more quickly than his unfortunate client, telephoned and commiserated with Alison. He thought it was too bad that she should have this added strain placed upon her. She had served them a magnificent dinner, and really she ought to be prostrate herself after being permitted to shiver for so long on the roof of Leydon Hall.
    “Really, that was too bad,” he said.
    “I’m tough,” Alison assured him.
    “I’m afraid you’ll find Sir Charles—I beg his pardon, Mr. Leydon!—a trifle inconsiderate,” he deplored. And then he added hastily, “Naturally, he doesn’t mean to be inconsiderate, but when a man is as wealthy as he is, and has had everything so far come his way so very easily, he’s inclined to be difficult. People like you and me, we have to defer, but it isn’t always easy.”
    “Mr. Leydon is proving an exemplary patient,” she assured him, to his astonishment, and it really was true.
    Charles Leydon was an exemplary patient.
    Apparently he hadn’t been ill for years—not even a slight cold—and that could have been the reason why all at once he was so submissive. He watched the doctor’s face when he called, and was obviously trying to detect whether or not he was feeling anxious about him. After three days the doctor assured him he was doing nicely, and he seemed to relax. He drew a deep breath, as if he had been secretly a little afraid. Curiously enough, her knowledge that he had been anxious about himself endeared him to Alison. Instead of an arrogant man who could order her about she had begun to think of him as a rather helpless little boy who had to plead with her occasionally when he wanted something she was by no means certain he should have, and that provided her with the novel sensation of having a certain amount of power over him.
    Fit and well, he was such an iron-hard, ruthless, inconsiderate man ... she was sure of that. Lying in bed, with his black hair ruffled by the pillow, his lavender silk pyjamas taking most of the colour out of his face, slight hollows in his cheeks and mauve shadows under his eyes, he was enough to wring any truly feminine woman’s heart.
    She was perfectly certain that as soon as he was on his feet again, and well enough to face the world—his world—their relationship would be back where it started. Neither of them would remember that he had once fallen asleep holding her hand, and that he had talked of casting her wedding-ring into the sea. That was all due, she was sure, to a rise of temperature.
    People did things, said things, when they were unwell,