Perhaps it was during the extremely slow and tiresome week-end on which Stella paid a visit to her family. She went without her umbrella,—not that it would have done much good if she had taken it, for Julian found, to his extreme vexation, that it was full of holes,—the weather was atrocious, and she came back with a cold.
It might have been gathered that no one at Amberley had ever had a cold before. As far as Julian was concerned nobody ever had.
Julian possessed a sane imagination, and generally treated the subject of health with a mixture of common sense and indifference. But this cold of Stella's!
It was no good Stella's saying it was a slight cold; he forced her to take a list of remedies suitable for severe bronchitis. He quarreled with his mother for saying that people had been known to recover from colds, and finally he sent for the doctor.
The doctor, being a wise man with a poor country practice, agreed with Julian that you could not be too careful about colds, and thought that priceless old port taken with her meals would not do Miss Waring any harm.
Stella disliked port very much, but she drank it submissively for a week.
"Nobody can call me fussy," Julian announced sternly, "but I will not have a neglected cold in the house."
He was not contradicted, though everybody knew that for weeks the cook and two housemaids had been sneezing about the passages.
It was a strange feeling, this sharp compulsion of fear. It taught Julian something. It taught him that what happened to Stella happened to himself. He no longer thought of pursuit in connection with her. He had found her in his heart.
It was an extremely awkward fact, but he accepted it. After all, he had crushed passions before which had gone against his code. He had iron self-control, and he thought it would be quite possible to stamp out this fancy before it got dangerous, even while he retained her presence.