o May
altogether certain that Miss Quisante would come. Yet she came with
ardent eagerness and her nephew was plainly glad to have her. It took May
a little while to understand why, but soon she saw the reason. Aunt Maria
was deep in the conspiracy, or the infatuation, or whatever it was to be
called; she flattered Quisante's hope of life, she applauded his defiance
of the inevitable; she hung on him more and more, herself forgetting and
making him forget the peril of the way he trod. He wanted to be told that
he was right, and he wanted an applauding audience. In both ways Aunt
Maria satisfied him. She would talk of the present as though it were no
more than a passing interruption of a long career, of the future as
though it stretched in assured leisure through years of great
achievement, of his life and his life's work as though both were in his
own hand and subject to nothing save his own will and power. She was to
him the readiest echo of the world's wonder and applause, the readiest
assurance that his great effort was not going unrecognised. Hence he
would have her with him, though there seemed no more love and no more
tenderness between them than when in old days they had quarrelled and he
had grumbled and she had flung him her money with a bitter jeer. But she
lived in him and could think of him only as living, and through her he
could cheat himself into an assurance that indeed he could live and work.

Then Aunt Maria was very bad for him. That could not be denied, but
something more nearly touching herself pressed on May Quisante. She had
seen the Mildmays' painful puzzle; she had listened to Dr. Claud Manton's
energetic warning; it was before her, no less than before the patient,
that Sir Rufus had washed his hands. She was not ignorant of the
questions the world asked. She was not careless, nor was she any longer
the dupe of her old delusion that such a man as Quisante could not die.
Her eye for truth had conquered; now she believed that, if he persisted
in his rebellion, he must surely die; unless all medical knowledge went
for nothing, he would surely die, and die not after long years of
lingering, but soon, perhaps very soon. A moment of excitement, say one
of the moments that she had loved so much, might kill him; so Claud
Manton said. A life of excitement would surely and early do the work. And
why was he rebellious? She accused himself, she accused Aunt Maria, she
accused the foolishly wondering, foolish