Living or dying he must be made to start for Thompson Hall at half-past five on the next morning. It was no longer a question of the amenities of Christmas, no longer a mere desire to satisfy the family ambition of her own people, no longer an anxiety to see her new brother-in-law. She was conscious that there was in that house one whom she had deeply injured, and from whose vengeance, even from whose aspect, she must fly. How could she endure to see that face which she was so well sure that she would recognise, or to hear the slightest sound of that voice which would be quite familiar to her ears, though it had never spoken a word in her hearing? She must certainly fly on the wings of the earliest train which would carry her towards the old house; but in order that she might do so she must propitiate her husband.

So she told her story. She had gone forth, as he had bade her, in search of the mustard, and then had suddenly lost her way. Up and down the house she had wandered, perhaps nearly a dozen times. “Had she met no one?” he asked in that raspy, husky whisper. “Surely there must have been some one about the hotel! Nor was it possible that she could have been roaming about all those hours.” “Only one hour, my dear,” she said. Then there was a question about the duration of time, in which both of them waxed angry, and as she became angry her husband waxed stronger, and as he became violent beneath the clothes the comfortable idea returned to her that he was not perhaps so ill as he would seem to be. She found herself driven to tell him something about the porter, having to account for that lapse of time by explaining how she had driven the poor man to search for the handkerchief which she had never lost.

“Why did you not tell him you wanted the mustard?”

“My dear!”

“Why not? There is nothing to be ashamed of in wanting mustard.”

“At one o’clock in the morning! I couldn’t do it. To tell you the truth, he wasn’t very civil, and I thought that he was, — perhaps a little tipsy. Now, my dear, do go to sleep.”

“Why didn’t you get the mustard?”

“There was none there, — nowhere at all about the room. I went down again and searched everywhere. That’s what took me so long. They always lock up those kind of things at these French hotels. They are too close-fisted to leave anything out. When you first spoke of it I knew that it would be gone when I got there. Now, my dear, do go to sleep, because we positively must start in the morning.”

“That is impossible,” said he, jumping up in the bed.

“We must go, my dear. I say that we must go. After all that has passed I wouldn’t not be with Uncle John and my cousin Robert to-morrow evening for more, — more, — more than I would venture to say.”

“Bother!” he exclaimed.

“It’s all very well for you to say that, Charles, but you don’t know. I say that we must go to-morrow, and we will.”

“I do believe you want to kill me, Mary.”

“That is very cruel, Charles, and most false, and most unjust. As for making you ill, nothing could be so bad for you as this wretched place, where nobody can get warm either day or night. If anything will cure your throat for you at once it will be the sea air. And only think how much more comfortable they can make you at Thompson Hall than anywhere in this country. I have so set my heart upon it, Charles, that I will do it. If we are not there to-morrow night Uncle John won’t consider us as belonging to the family.”

“I don’t believe a word of it.”

“Jane told me so in her letter. I wouldn’t let you know before because I thought it so unjust. But that has been the reason why I’ve been so earnest about it all through.”

It was a thousand pities that so good a woman should have been driven by the sad stress of circumstances to tell so many fibs. One after another she was compelled to invent them, that there might be a way open to her of escaping the horrors of a prolonged sojourn in that hotel. At length, after much grumbling, he became silent, and she trusted that he was sleeping.