avoided mentioning her husband's assumed name to him at their first interview, the doctor's distrust of her was necessarily of the vaguest kind. He had heard her voice fail her—he had seen her color change. He suspected her of a mental reservation on the subject of Midwinter—and of nothing more.
'Did you permit him to have his way?' she asked. 'In your place, I should have shown him the door.'
The impenetrable composure of her tone warned the doctor that her self-command was not to be further shaken that night. He resumed the character of Mrs. Armadale's medical referee on the subject of Mr. Armadale's mental health.
'If I had only had my own feelings to consult,' he said, 'I don't disguise from you that I should (as you say) have shown Mr. Midwinter the door. But on appealing to Mr. Armadale, I found he was himself anxious not to be parted from his friend. Under those circumstances, but one alternative was left—the alternative of humoring him again. The responsibility of thwarting him—to say nothing,' added the doctor, drifting for a moment toward the truth, 'of my natural apprehension, with such a temper as his friend's, of a scandal and disturbance in the house— was not to be thought of for a moment. Mr. Midwinter accordingly remains here for the night; and occupies (I ought to say, insists on occupying) the next room to Mr. Armadale. Advise me, my dear madam, in this emergency,' concluded the doctor, with his loudest emphasis. 'What rooms shall we put them in, on the first floor?'
'Put Mr. Armadale in Number Four.'
'And his friend next to him, in Number Three?' said the doctor. 'Well! well! well! perhaps they
Mr. Bashwood came back from the far end of the corridor—still pondering, in unutterable expectation, on what was to come with the night.
'Am I to go now?' he asked.
'No. You are to stay. I said you should know all if you waited till the morning. Wait here.'
He hesitated, and looked about him. 'The doctor,' he faltered. 'I thought the doctor said—'
'The doctor will interfere with nothing that I do in this house to-night. I tell you to stay. There are empty rooms on the floor above this. Take one of them.'
Mr. Bashwood felt the trembling fit coming on him again as he looked at her. 'May I ask—?' he began.
'Ask nothing. I want you.'
'Will you please to tell me—?'
'I will tell you nothing till the night is over and the morning has come.'
His curiosity conquered his fear. He persisted.
'Is it something dreadful?' he whispered. 'Too dreadful to tell me?'
She stamped her foot with a sudden outbreak of impatience. 'Go!' she said, snatching the key of the staircase door from the window-sill. 'You do quite right to distrust me—you do quite right to follow me no further in the dark. Go before the house is shut up. I can do without you.' She led the way to the stairs, with the key in one hand, and the candle in the other.
Mr. Bashwood followed her in silence. No one, knowing what he knew of her earlier life, could have failed to perceive that she was a woman driven to the last extremity, and standing consciously on the brink of a Crime. In the first terror of the discovery, he broke free from the hold she had on him: he thought and acted like a man who had a will of his own again.
She put the key in the door, and turned to him before she opened it, with the light of the candle on her face. 'Forget me, and forgive me,' she said. 'We meet no more.'
She opened the door, and, standing inside it, after he had passed her, gave him her hand. He had resisted her look, he had resisted her words, but the magnetic fascination of her touch conquered him at the final moment. 'I can't leave you!' he said, holding helplessly by the hand she had given him. 'What must I do?'
'Come and see,' she answered, without allowing him an instant to reflect.
Closing her hand firmly on his, she led him along the first floor corridor to the room numbered Four. 'Notice that room,' she whispered. After a look over the stairs to see that they were alone, she retraced her steps with him to the opposite extremity of the corridor. Here, facing the window which lit the place at the other end, was one little room, with a narrow grating in the higher part of the door, intended for the sleeping apartment of the doctor's deputy. From the position of this room, the grating commanded a view of the bed-chambers down each side of the corridor, and so enabled the deputy-physician to inform himself of any irregular proceedings on the part of the patients under his care, with little or no chance of being detected in watching them. Miss Gwilt opened the door and led the way into the empty room.
'Wait here,' she said, 'while I go back upstairs; and lock yourself in, if you like. You will be in the dark, but the gas will be burning in the corridor. Keep at the grating, and make sure that Mr. Armadale goes into the room I have just pointed out to you, and that he doesn't leave it afterward. If you lose sight of the room for a single moment before I come back, you will repent it to the end of your life. If you do as I tell you, you shall see me to-morrow, and claim your own reward. Quick with your answer! Is it Yes or No?'
He could make no reply in words. He raised her hand to his lips, and kissed it rapturously. She left him in the room. From his place at the grating he saw her glide down the corridor to the staircase door. She passed through it, and locked it. Then there was silence.
The next sound was the sound of the women-servants' voices. Two of them came up to put the sheets on the beds in Number Three and Number Four. The women were in high good-humor, laughing and talking to each other through the open doors of the rooms. The master's customers were coming in at last, they said, with a vengeance; the house would soon begin to look cheerful, if things went on like this.
After a little, the beds were got ready and the women returned to the kitchen floor, on which the sleeping- rooms of the domestic servants were all situated. Then there was silence again.
The next sound was the sound of the doctor's voice. He appeared at the end of the corridor, showing Allan and
