'll see Dr. Angus to-morrow," said Marcella presently. "But I
don't think it's much use. That's the worst of being married to an
enthusiastic medical student! You know so much!"

The wood crackled for a while before Aunt Janet spoke.

"We are getting wiped out, Marcella! Only an old stick like me, who has
repressed everything, lives to tell the tale. I've ruled myself never to
feel anything."

"I'm glad I haven't. I'd rather be smashed up with pain than be dead.
You see, Aunt Janet, you repressed things and I took them out and walked
over them."

"Maybe I would if I had my time to go over again. But I don't know. It's
a blessing not to feel. I'm fond of you, you know, but I scarcely felt
your going away. And I don't suppose I shall feel your dying very much."

"You care about Andrew," said Marcella quickly.

"Yes, I care about Andrew," said Aunt Janet and gathered herself into
the past.

The next day Marcella went to see Dr. Angus who was horrified and
incredulous, and wired for a specialist from Edinburgh. Marcella knew it
was all useless, and when the specialist went away after talking to Dr.
Angus, without saying anything more about operations, she felt very
glad.

Louis suspected nothing; he was working very hard for his first
examination the week before Easter and she would not have him worried;
she wrote to him every day, though writing grew more and more difficult.
She fought desperately against being an invalid and staying in bed, but
at last she had to give way; Dr. Angus came every day and talked to her
for hours; sometimes he gave her morphia; once or twice when the pain
had stranded her almost unbreathing on a shore of numbness and
exhaustion she wished that she had died in the hospital in Sydney: but
not for long; in spite of the pain she wanted to live. Once or twice,
when all was quiet, and the pain was having its night-time orgy with
her, she cried out in the unbearable agony of it. She would have no one
with her at nights, but Aunt Janet's uncanny penetration guessed at the
pain and she made Dr. Angus leave morphia tablets for her. At first,
though they were at her hand, she refused them.

"I don't want to waste time in unconsciousness," she said once. Later,
she grew glad to waste time: she understood how her father used to pray
for drugs when he was too tired to pray for courage in those weary
nights of his. Another time she said that it was cowardly: Louis, in his
whisky days, had been see