must make, and try to make
with a sincerity which should rise unimpaired from the conflicts of her
heart. She had caught at coming to Ashwood because she thought she could
make it best there, not indeed in the room where she had lied for him,
nor by the tree where she had turned to Marchmont in a pang of wild
regret, but there, on Duty Hill, where he had won her, had touched his
highest, and had seemed a conqueror. She took him there, climbing with
him very slowly, very gently; there she made him sit and sat by him.
Again it was a quiet evening, and still the valley stretched below;
nothing changed here made all the changes of her life seem half unreal.
Here she told him he must live, he must be docile and must live.

"You may get strong again, but for the time you must do as the doctors
say. You ought to; for the little girl's sake, if for nothing else, you
ought to. You know you're risking another seizure now, and you know what
that might mean."

His eyes were fixed keenly on her, though he lay back motionless in
weariness.

"You ought to live for your daughter." She paused a minute and added,
"And some day we might have a son, and you'd live again in him; we both
should; we should feel that we were doing--that you were doing--everything
he did. I think your son would be a great man, and I should be proud to
be his mother. Isn't the hope of that worth something?"

He was silent, watching her closely still.

"I know what you think of me," she continued. "You think an active life
essential to me, that I can't do without it. God knows I loved all you
did, I loved your triumphs, I loved to hear you speak and see them
listen. You know I loved all that, loved it too much perhaps. But I'll do
without it. I'm your wife, your fate's mine. It'll be the braver thing
for you to face it, really; I'm ready to face it with you."

Still he would only look at her.

"We know what we both are," she went on with a little smile. "We're not
Mildmays, you and I. But let's try. I must tell you. I can't bear to
think that it's partly at least because of me that you won't try, that if
I were a different sort of woman it might be much easier for you to try.
If it's that at all, imagine what I should feel if--if anything happened
such as the doctors are afraid of."

"I've chosen my course. I believe the doctors are all wrong."

"Do you really believe that?" she asked quickly.

He shrugged his shoulders, seeming to say that he would no