'I am,' he replied, trying to feel my pulse; 'I think it's frightfully serious. I shall get Toby to see you to-day and take you up to a specialist to-morrow. I understand it's frightfully on the increase amongst women.'
Well, I have heard of people with an idee fixé, and if there is such a thing as an insect fixe I must have it, and pretty badly, too, for another dropped out just before lunch when I was going to wash my face.
Nannie came in then and said, 'Dearie, why don't you keep your sponge on the top of your water jug instead of by the window; that's the fourth centipede I've found in your basin this week.'
She is a comfort.
But to-day I had another kind of delusion, for I went out alone in Uncle Jasper's woods to gather early primroses. It was in the dusk, just when the woods were growing dark and filled with mystery. But I'm not frightened now, for ever since I saw that man in church I love to go out in that gloaming time and let the 'longing that is not akin to pain' steal over me.
And then I saw him coming down the little path, and when he drew quite near he saw me, too, and a startled look came in his eyes and a great wonder. He stopped a moment and it seemed as if he half held out his hands to me.
And I? I don't know what I felt save that it seemed again as if I had met some one I had known before. I dropped my flowers and ran home with my heart beating. But I knew, of course, he did not really stop. I must have dreamed the startled wonder of his face, that look of sudden adoration in his eyes.
Father met me at the entrance of the Park.
'Why, darling! were you frightened in the woods?'
'No,' I said, but I clung to his arm, and he turned autocratic then, and in his funny way forgot that I am grown up now, and forbade me to go out alone so late, because he thought that I had had a sudden fright such as I had when I was little, and the woods grew tulgy, and the trees turned to fantastic shapes, and strange things rustled in the undergrowth.