"Doctor Strong," she said, violently, her voice low and vibrating, as some women's are in passion, "I must request you not to look at me!"
Geoffrey started, and coloured in his turn. "I beg your pardon!" he said. "I was not aware—I assure you I had no intention of being rude, Miss Blyth."
"You were not rude!" Vesta swept on. "I am rude; I am unreasonable, I am absurd. I can't help it. I will not be looked at professionally. Half the people in this village would welcome your professional glance as a beam from heaven, and bask in it, and drop every symptom as if it were a pearl, but I am not a 'case.' I am simply a human being, who asks nothing but to be let alone."
She stopped abruptly, her bosom heaving, her eyes like black agates with fire behind them, looking straight past him at the trees beyond. "If you wish to put me to the last humiliation," she added, hurriedly, "you may wait and have the satisfaction of seeing me cry; if not—"
But Geoffrey was gone, fleeing into the house with the sound of stormy sobs chasing him like Furies. He never stopped till he reached his own room, where he flung himself into his chair in most unprofessional agitation. The window was open—what a fool he was to leave windows open!—and the sound followed him; he could not shut it out. Dreadful sobs, choking, agonising; he felt, as if he saw it, the whole slender figure convulsed with them. Good heavens! the girl would be in convulsions if she went on at this rate.
Now the sobs died away into long moans, into quivering breaths; now they broke out again, insistent, terrible. Broken words among them, too.
"What shall I do? Oh, dear! oh, dear! what shall I do?"
Geoffrey, who had been trying to look over some papers, started up and paced the room hurriedly. "This—this is very curious!" he was trying to say to himself. "Hysteria pure and simple—very interesting—I must note the duration of the paroxysms. Good God! can't somebody stop her? perfectly inhuman, to let a creature go on like that!"
He was at the door, with some vague idea of alarming the house, when a soft knock was heard on the other side. He flung the door open, and startled Miss Vesta so that she gave a little cry of dismay, and retreated to the head of the stairs. "Pray excuse me, Doctor Strong," she said. "I see that you are occupied; I pray you to excuse me!"
"No, no!" said Geoffrey, hurriedly. "I am not—it's nothing at all.
What can I do for you, Miss Vesta? Do come in, please!"