the senses of the man beside her.  Suddenly he had thrown his arm round her, and crushed her to him, kissing the smooth cool face and the dazzling hair.  And she had nestled up to him and laughed—­not the least abashed or astonished; so that even then, through his excitement, there had struck a renewed and sharp speculation as to her twenty-four hours’ engagement to the Curate, in the spring of the year; as to the privileges she must have allowed him; and no doubt to others before him.

At that time, it was tacitly understood between them that no engagement could be announced.  Alicia was well aware that Brookshire was looking on; that Brookshire was on the side of Diana Mallory, the forsaken, and was not at all inclined to forgive either the deserting lover or the supplanting damsel; so that while she was not loath to sting and mystify Brookshire by whatever small signs of her power over Oliver Marsham she could devise; though she queened it beside him on his coach, and took charge with Lady Lucy of his army of women canvassers; though she faced the mob with him at Hartingfield, on the occasion of the first disturbance there in June, and had stood beside him, vindictively triumphant on the day of his first hard-won victory, she would wear no ring, and she baffled all inquiries, whether of her relations or her girl friends.  Her friendship with her cousin Oliver was nobody’s concern but her own, she declared, and all they both wanted was to be let alone.

Meanwhile she had been shaken and a little frightened by the hostile feeling shown toward her, no less than Oliver, in the first election.  She had taken no part in the second, although she had been staying at Tallyn all through it, and was present when Oliver was brought in, half fainting and agonized with pain, after the Hartingfield riot.

* * * * *

Oliver, now lying with closed eyes on his sofa, lived again through the sensations and impressions of that first hour:  the pain—­the arrival of the doctor—­the injection of morphia—­the blessed relief stealing through his being—­and then Alicia’s face beside him.  Delivered from the obsession of intolerable anguish, he had been free to notice with a kind of exultation the tears in the girl’s eyes, her pale tremor and silence.  Never yet had Alicia wept for him or anything that concerned him.  Never, indeed, had he seen her weep in his whole life before.  He triumphed in her tears.

Since then, however, their whole relation had insensibly and radically changed; their positions toward each other were reversed.  Till the day of his injury and his defeat, Marsham had been in truth the wooed and Alicia the wooer.  Now it seemed to him as though, through his physical pain, he were all the time clinging to something that shrank away and resisted him—­something that would ultimately elude and escape him.

He knew well that Alicia liked sickness and melancholy no more than he did; and he was constantly torn between a desire to keep her near him and a perception that to tie her to his sick-room was, in fact, the worst of policies.