sie herself felt a pang of fear, and it was a genuine terror she
carried to the grim house in Harley Street a few days later. The next
week she was at Cloom.

Ishmael was shocked at the change in her. Her hair, that had still shown
its old brassy hue when last he had seen her at the time of the fall of
the Government, was now a faded grey--that harsh green-grey that fair
hair nearly always turns to on its way to white. There were hollows
under her eyes, and her full mouth looked drawn. She smiled at his
shocked exclamation that he could not suppress.

"Don't look like that!" she told him. "The doctor says it's not
hopeless, or wouldn't be if I'd let them operate."

"It? What is it?" asked Ishmael.

"Tuberculosis in the knee. They want me to have my leg off, and I won't.
You don't want me to, do you, Ishmael? I'd rather die whole if I've got
to."

He had felt all his blood rush to his head with the horror of it; his
heart pounded sickeningly, a darkness swirled before his eyes. Vassie
linked her arm in his and walked him up and down the lawn in front of
the house; from within they could hear the steady rumble of Dan's voice
as he talked to Georgie. Ishmael could not trust himself to speak.
Vassie was very dear to him, though there had been few caresses between
them during their lives. She stood for something to him no one else ever
had, even as she did for John-James. She had never been popular with
women--Phoebe had feared her, Georgie called her hard and coarse; but
to men, though with all her beauty she had been very unattractive to
them as far as her sex went, she meant a good deal as a friend. Judith
and she were the only two of the old set who had ever been really
intimate, and that was more a curious kinship between them, a mutual
respect born out of the strength each recognised in the other's very
different character, than anything warmer. But to Ishmael and John-James
she still held the glow that for them had enwrapped her even in early
days when her destiny was only clear cut in her own mind, and when her
hardness, commented on by others, was to them an unknown quantity. When
she turned it towards them it became strength, and it did not need
caresses to tell Ishmael that what of tenderness she possessed was more
for him than for anyone else in the world. She felt more his equal than
she did with Dan, whom she alternately despised, with the kindly despite
of a wife, and respected for qualities of brain that