VERY HARD CASH.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "IT IS NEVER TOO LATE TO MEND."

CHAPTER XLIII.

On Alfred's leaving Silverton, Mrs. Archbold
was prostrated. It was a stunning blow to her
young passion, and left her weary, desolate.

But she was too strong to lie helpless under
disappointed longings. Two days she sat
stupified with the heartache; after that she bustled
about her work in a fervour of half-crazy restlessness,
and ungovernable irritability, quenched at
times by fits of weeping. As she wept apart,
but raged and tyrannised in public, she soon made
Silverton House Silverton Oven, especially to
those who had the luck to be of her sex. Then
Baker timidly remonstrated: at the first word
she snapped him up and said a change would be
good for both of them: he apologised; in vain:
that very day she closed by letter with Dr.
Wolf, who had often invited her to be his
"Matron." Her motive, half hidden from
herself, was to be anywhere near her favourite.

Installed at Drayton House, she waited some
days, and coquetted woman-like with her own
desires, then dressed neatly, but soberly, and
called at Dr. Wycherley's; sent in a note
explaining who she was, with a bit of soft sawder,
and asked to see Alfred.

She was politely but peremptorily refused.
She felt this rebuff bitterly. She went home
stung and tingling to the core. But Bitters
wholesome be: offended pride now allied with
strong good sense to wither a wild affection;
and, as it was no longer fed by the presence of
its object, her wound healed, all but the occasional
dull throbbing that precedes a perfect cure.

At this stage of her convalescence Dr. Wolf
told her in an off-hand way that Mr. Hardie, a
patient of doubtful insanity, was coming to his
asylum, to be kept there by hook or by crook.
(She was entirely in Wolf's confidence, and he
talked of these things to her in English.) The
impenetrable creature assented outwardly, with
no sign of emotion whatever, but one flash of the
eye, and one heave of the bosom swiftly
suppressed. She waited calmly and patiently till
she was alone; then yielded to joy and triumph;
they seemed to leap inside her. But this very
thing alarmed her. " Better for me never to see
him again," she thought. " His power over me
is too terrible. Ah, good-by to the peace
and comfort I have been building up! He will
scatter them to the winds. He has."

She tried not to think of him too much.
And, while she was so struggling, Wolf let out
that Alfred was to have morphia at dinner the
first day; morphia, the accursed drug with
which these dark men in these dark places coax
the reason away out of the head by degrees, or
with a potent dose stupify the victim, then act
surprise, alarm; and make his stupor the ground
for applying medical treatment to the doomed
wretch. Edith Archbold knew the game, and at
the word morphia Pity and Passion rose in her
bosom irresistible. She smiled in Dr. Wolf's
face, and hated him; and secretly girt herself up
to baffle him, and protect Alfred's reason, and
win his heart through his gratitude.

She received him as I have related, to throw
dust in Dr. Wolf's eyes: but she acted so
admirably that some went into Alfred's. " Ah,"
thought he, " she is angry with herself for her
amorous folly; and, with the justice of her sex,
she means to spite poor me for it." He sighed;
for he felt her hostility would be fatal to him.
To give her no fresh offence, he fell into her
manner, and treated her with a world of distant
respect. Then again, who else but she could
have warned him against poison? Then again,
if so, why look so cold and stern at him? He
cast one or two wistful glances at her; but the
artful woman of thirty was impenetrable in public
to the candid man of twenty-one. Even her
passion could not put them on an equality.

That night he could not sleep. He lay
wondering what would be the next foul practice, and
how he should parry it.

He wrote next morning to the Commissioners
that two of their number, unacquainted with the
previous proceedings of the Board, had been
surprised into endorsing an order of transfer to an
asylum bearing a very inferior character to Dr.
Wycherley's; the object of this was clearly foul
play. Accordingly, Dr. Wolf had already tried
to poison his reason, by drugging his beer at
dinner. He added that Dr. Wycherley had now
signed a certificate of his sanity, and implored
the Board to inspect it, and discharge him at
once, or else let a solicitor visit him at once, and
take the requisite steps towards a public inquiry.