?"

"It's as you wish," he said coldly.

He forced back the natural questions that came to him. He had a
disordered conviction that he was fighting her for his sanity, for the
very ground on which he had built his life, and that he dared not yield
by so much as a kindly word. He did what lay in his power for her with
a heart shut and barred.

She brought a little of her world and her whole outlook with her. On
the last day that she was able to be up she dressed herself in a gay
mandarin's coat with a Chinese woman's trousers, and tried to do her
dance for the benefit of a shocked and fascinated matron. Every
morning she wore a new cap to set off the deepening shadow of
dissolution.

By the open fire the old woman embroidered ceaselessly.

"She is making--'ow you call it?--my shroud. You see--with ze blue
ribbons. Blue--that's my colour--my lucky colour. As soon as I could
speak I ask for blue ribbons in my pinafore."

"I should have thought your mind might be better occupied now," he
retorted with brutal commonplaceness.

She winked at him.

"Oh, but I 'ave 'ad my leetle talk with _Monsieur le Cure_. 'E and I
are ze best of friends, though I never met 'im before. 'E understand
about ze blue ribbons. But Monsieur Robert is too clever."

"It seems so," he said scornfully.

She questioned him from out of the thickening cloud of morphia. "You
don't believe in God?" And then as he shook his head she smiled
sleepily. "Well, it is still possible 'e exist, _Monsieur_--_Monsieur
le docteur_."

She lay quiet so that he thought she had fallen asleep, but the next
moment her eyes had opened, widening on him with a startling
wakefulness. It was as though her whole personality had leapt to arms,
and bursting through the narcotic, stood free with a gay and laughing
gesture. "As to God--I don't know about 'im, but I exist--I go on.
You bet your 'at on that, my friend. I don't know where I go--but I go
somewhere. And I dance. And if St. Peter sit at ze golden gates, like
they say in ze fairybook, I say to 'im: ''Ave you ever seen ze Gyp
Galop?' And then I dance for 'im and ze angels play for me"--she nodded
wickedly--"not 'ymn tunes."

She was serious. She meant it. If she survived she survived as what
she was or not at all. And looking down on her wasted, tortured body,
Stonehouse had a momentary but extraordinarily vivid conviction that
what she had said was true. She would persist. Whatever else