e had to cling to; he kept her alive. Yet the last words
that Miss Quisante said were, "I expect Sandro wanted to wheedle
something out of that woman, and has been playing one of his tricks to
get a bit of sympathy." Then she climbed slowly and totteringly down the
stairs.

Left alone, May Quisante sat in apparent idleness, letting her thoughts
play with a freedom which some people consider in itself blameworthy,
though certainly no action and often no desire accompany the picture
which the mind draws. She said to herself, "Supposing this is true, or
that more than this is true, supposing his heart is unsound, what does it
mean to me?" What it excluded was easier to realise than what it meant.
Unless Quisante were to have not existence only, but also health, such
health at least as enables a man to do work although not, may be, to
glory in the doing of it, unless there were to the engine wheels sound
enough to answer to the spur of the steam that his brain's furnace made,
nothing could come about of what Lady Castlefort's Mightiness prophesied,
nothing of what friends and enemies had begun to look for, nothing of
what May herself had grown to regard as his future and hers, as the
basis, the condition, the circumstances, of her life and of his. An old
thought of her own came to her, back from the dim region of ante-marriage
days, the idea to which the Henstead doctor had given a terse, if
metaphorical, expression. Quisante was their race-horse, their money was
on him, they wanted a win for the stable. If this or more than this were
true, then there would be no win for the stable; the horse was a grand
horse, but he wouldn't stand training. What was left then? An invalid and
the wife of an invalid, coddlings, cossetings, devotion, ambition far
away, life kept in him by loving heart and loving hands. Hers must be the
heart and the hands. Hers also were the keen eyes that knew every
weakness, every baseness, of the man to whom heart and hands must
minister, but would see no more the battle and the triumph and the
brilliance which set them sparkling and seemed to make the world alight
for them.

For a little while the third thing, the remaining possibility, was
unformulated in her thoughts; perhaps she had a scruple which made her
turn away from it. But her speculations would not be denied their
irresponsible freedom of ranging over all the field of chance. If it were
true, if more than it, more than the kind timid woman ha