He nodded; but Alma bent over him, and touched his forehead with her lips.

‘You’re in a fever, I suppose you know?’

‘I shall be all right tomorrow.  Goodnight, dear.’

In town, this morning, she had called at a chemist’s, and purchased a little bottle of something in repute for fashionable disorder of the nerves.  Before lying down she took the prescribed dose, though with small hope that it would help her to a blessed unconsciousness.  Another thing she did which had not occurred to her for many a night:  she knelt by the bedside, and half thought, half whispered through tearless sobs, a petition not learnt from any book, a strange half-heathen blending of prayer for moral strength, and entreaty for success in a worldly desire.  Her mind shook perilously in its balance.  It was well for Alma that the fashionable prescription did not fail her.  In the moment of despair, when she had turned and turned again upon her pillow, haunted by a vision in the darkness, tortured by the never-ending echo of a dreadful voice, there fell upon her a sudden quiet; her brain was soothed by a lulling air from dreamland; her limbs relaxed, and forgot their aching weariness; she sighed and slept.

‘I am much better this morning,’ she said at breakfast.  ’Not a trace of fever —­ no headache.’

‘And a face the colour of the table-cloth,’ added Harvey.

There was a letter from Mrs. Frothingham, conveying good wishes not very fervently expressed.  She had decided not to come up for the concert, feeling that the excitement would be too much for her; but Alma suspected another reason.

She had not asked her husband whether he meant to have a seat in Prince’s Hall this afternoon; she still waited for him to speak about it.  After breakfast he asked her when she would start for town.  At noon, she replied.  Every arrangement had been completed; it would be enough if she reached the Hall half an hour before the time of the recital, and after a light luncheon at a neighbouring restaurant.

‘Then we may as well go together,’ said her husband.

‘You mean to come, then?’ she asked dreamily.

‘I shall go in at the last moment —­ a seat at the back.’

Anything but inclined for conversation, Alma acquiesced.  For the next hour or two she kept in solitude, occasionally touching her violin, but always recurring to an absent mood, a troubled reverie.  She could not fix her thoughts upon the trial that was before her.  In a vague way she feared it; but another fear, at times amounting to dread, dimmed the day’s event into insignificance.  The morning’s newspapers were before her, sent, no doubt, by Dymes’s direction, and she mused over the eye-attracting announcements of her debut.  ’Mrs. Harvey Rolfe’s First Violin Recital, Prince’s Hall, this afternoon, at 3.’  It gave her no more gratification than if the name had been that of a stranger.

The world had grown as unreal as a nightmare.  People came before her mind, people the most intimately known, and she seemed but faintly to recognise them.  They were all so much changed since yesterday.  Their relations to each other and to her were altered, confused.  Scarce one of them she could regard without apprehension or perplexity.