and
understood it; it appealed at once to his malice and to his vanity; it
was a foretaste of the wonder he would raise and the applause he would
win, if he determined to face the price that might have to be paid for
them. He had listened with exasperated impatience to kind Lady Mildmay's
pleadings with him, to her motherly insisting on perfect rest for his
mind, and to her pathetically hopeful picture of the new interests and
the new pleasure he would find in days of rest and peace, with his wife
tenderly looking after him. To such charming as that his ears were deaf;
they pricked at the faintest sound of distant cheering. It would be
something to show even Aunt Maria that he was not done with; what would
it not be to show it to the world--and to that wife of his whom he loved
and could hold only by his deeds?

"I only know what the doctors say," remarked Miss Quisante. "They say you
must throw up everything."

"You wouldn't have me risk another of those damned strokes, would you?"
he asked, the mockery most evident now in his voice and look. "Lady
Mildmay implores me to be careful, almost with tears. I suppose my own
aunt'll be still more anxious, and my own wife too?"

"Doctors aren't infallible. And they don't know you, Sandro. You're not
like other men." Hard as the tone was, his ears drank in the words
eagerly. "They don't know how much there is in you."

Again he leant forward and said almost in a whisper,

"May thinks I'm done for?" Aunt Maria nodded. "And she'll nurse me? Take
me to some infernal invalids' place, full of bath-chairs, and walk beside
mine, eh?" Aunt Maria smiled grimly. "She'll like that, won't she?" he
asked.

"You won't die," she said suddenly and abruptly, her eyes fixed on his.

"What?" he asked sharply. "Well, who said I was going to die?"

"The doctors--unless you go to the invalids' place."

"Oh, and my dear aunt doesn't agree with them?" Eagerness now broke
through the mockery in his tones. He had longed so for a word of hope,
for someone to persuade him that he might still live and could still
work. "But suppose they proved right? Well, that's no worse than the
other anyhow."

"Not much," said Aunt Maria. "But I don't believe 'em." Her faith in him
came back at his first summons of it. He had but to tell her that he
would live and need not die, and she would believe him. Sandro's ways
were not as other men's; she could not believe that for Sandro as for
other men there were