"Why have you quarrelled with your husband?" I asked in my most matter-of-course tone, as soon as I was seated, and had heard about her cold.
"I have not quarrelled with my husband," she answered, evidently surprised.
"Then what does he mean by saying that he hasn't the entrée to your private apartments?"
"I am sure he made no complaint about that," she answered tranquilly.
This was true. He had merely mentioned the fact casually, and not as a thing that affected his comfort or happiness in any way.
"Colonel Colquhoun and I are better friends now, if anything, than we have ever been," she added of her own accord, with inquiry in her eyes, as if she wanted to know what could have made me think otherwise.
I should have said myself that they were excellent friends, but what precisely did "friends" mean? I scented something anomalous here. However, it was not a point that I considered it advisable to pursue. I had ascertained that there was no morbid feeling in the matter, and that was all that I required to know. I only paid her a short visit that morning, and did not return for two days; but I had been thinking seriously about her case in the interval, and carefully prepared to inquire into it particularly; and an evident increase of languor and depression gave me a good opening.
"Tell me how you are to-day," I began. "Any trouble?"
"The worry in my head is awful!" she exclaimed. "Let me go downstairs. I am better there."
She was essentially a child of light and air and movement, requiring sunshine indoors as well as out to keep her in health. An Italian proverb says where the sun does not come, the doctor does, and this had been only too true in her case. It was pure animal instinct which had made the west window of the drawing room her favourite place. Nature, animal and vegetable, is under an imperative law to seek the sun, and she had unconsciously obeyed it for her own good. But she required more than that transient gleam in the western window; a sun bath daily, when it could be had, is what I should have prescribed for her; and from her next remark I judged that she had discovered for herself the harm which the deprivation of light was doing her.