'No, I must get back,' said Lucy, obstinately.

Afterwards she brought her work as usual, and he professed to smoke and read. But the evening pa.s.sed, for him, beneath his outward quiet, in a hideous whirl of images and sensations, which ultimately wore itself out, and led to a mood of dulness and numbness. Every now and then, as he sat there, with the fire crackling, and the familiar walls and books about him, he felt himself sinking, as it were, in a sudden abyss of horror; then, again, the scene of the afternoon seemed to him absurd, and he despised his own panic. He dwelt upon everything the doctor had said about the rarity, the exceptional nature of such an illness.

Well, what is rare does not happen--not to oneself--that was what he seemed to be clinging to at last.

When Lucy went up to bed, he followed her in about a quarter of an hour.

'Why, you are early!' she said, opening her eyes.

'I am tired,' he said. 'There was a great press of work to-day. I want a long night.'

In reality, he could not bear her out of his sight. Hour after hour he tossed restlessly, beside her quiet sleep, till the spring morning broke.

They left Manchester next morning in a bitter east wind. As she pa.s.sed through the hall to the cab, Lucy left a little note for Dora on the table, with instructions that it should be posted.

'I want her to come and see him at his bedtime,' she said, 'for of course we can't get back for that.'

David said nothing. When they got to the station, he dared not even propose to her the extra comfort of first cla.s.s, lest he should intensify the alarm he perfectly well divined under her offhand, flighty manner.

By three o'clock they were in the waiting-room of the famous doctor they had come to see. Lucy looked round her nervously as they entered, with quick, dilating nostrils, and across David there swept a sudden choking memory of the trapped and fluttering birds he had sometimes seen in his boyhood struggling beneath a birdcatcher's net on the moors.

As the appointment was at an unusual time, they were not kept waiting very long by the great man. He received them with a sort of kindly distance, made his examination very quickly, and asked her a number of general questions, entering the answers in his large patients' book.

Then he leant back in his chair, looking thoughtfully at Lucy over his spectacles.

'Well,' he said at last, with a perfectly cheerful and businesslike voice, 'I am quite clear there is only one thing to be done, Mrs.

Grieve. You must have that growth removed.'

Lucy flushed.

'I want you to give me something to take it away,' she said, half sullenly, half defiantly. She was sitting very erect, in a little tight-fitting black jacket, with her small black hat and veil on her knee.

'No, I am sorry to say nothing can be done in that way. If you were my daughter or sister, I should say to you, have that lump removed without a day's, an hour's unnecessary delay. These growths are not to be trifled with.'

He spoke with a mild yet penetrating observance of her. A number of reflections were pa.s.sing rapidly through his mind. The operation was a most unpromising one, but it was clearly the surgeon's duty to try it. The chances were that it would prolong life which was now speedily and directly threatened, owing to the proximity of the growth to certain vital points.

'When could you do it?' said David, so hoa.r.s.ely that he had to repeat his question. He was standing with his arm on the mantelpiece, looking down on the surgeon and his wife.

The great man lifted his eyebrows, and looked at his engagement-book attentively.

'I _could_ do it to-morrow,' he said at last; 'and the sooner, the better. Have you got lodgings? or can I help you? And--'

Then he stopped, and looked at Lucy. 'Let me settle things with your husband, Mrs. Grieve,' he said, with a kindly smile. 'You look tired after your journey. You will find a fire and some newspapers in the waiting-room.'

And, with a suavity not to be gainsaid, he ushered her himself across the hall, and shut the waiting-room door upon her. Then he came back to David.

A little while after a bell rang, and the man-servant who answered it presently took some brandy into the consulting-room. Lucy meanwhile sat, in a dazed way, looking out of window at the square garden, where the lilacs were already in full leaf in spite of the east wind.

When her husband and the doctor came in she sprang up, looking partly awkward, partly resentful. Why had they been discussing it all without her?

'Well, Mrs. Grieve,' said the doctor, 'your husband is just going to take you on to see the lodgings I recommend. By good luck they are just vacant. Then, if you like them, you know, you can settle in at once.'

'But I haven't brought anything for the night,' cried Lucy in an injured voice, looking at David.

'We will telegraph to Dora, darling,' he said, taking up her bag and umbrella from the table; 'but now we mustn't keep Mr. Selby. He has to go out.'

'How long will it take?' interrupted Lucy, addressing the surgeon.

'Can I get back next day?'

'Oh no! you will have to be four or five days in town. But don't alarm yourself, Mrs. Grieve. You won't know anything at all about the operation itself; your husband will look after you, and then a little patience--and hope for the best. Now I really must be off.

Good-bye to you--good-bye to you.'

And he hurried off, leaving them to find their own cab. When they got in, Lucy said, pa.s.sionately:--

'I want to go back, David. I want Sandy. I won't go to these lodgings.'

Then courage came to him. He took her hand.

'Dear, dear wife--for my sake--for Sandy's!'

She stared at him--at his white face.

'Shall I die?' she cried, with the same pa.s.sionate tone.

'No, no, no!' he said, kissing the quivering hand, and seeing no one but her in the world, though they were driving through the crowd of Regent Street. 'But we must do everything Mr. Selby said.

That hateful thing must be taken away--it is so near--think for yourself!--to the eye and the brain; and it might go downwards to the throat. You will be brave, won't you? We will look after you so--Dora and I.'

Lucy sank back in the cab, with a sudden collapse of nerve and spirit. David hung over her, comforting her, one moment promising her that in a few days she should have Sandy again, and be quite well; the next, checked and turned to stone by the memory of the terrible possibilities freely revealed to him in his private talk with Mr. Selby, and by the sense that he might be soothing the present only to make the future more awful.

'David! she is in such fearful pain! The nurse says she must have more morphia. They didn't give her enough. Will you run to Mr.

Selby's house? You won't find him, of course--he is on his round--but his a.s.sistant, who was with him here just now, went back there. Run for him at once.'

It was Dora who spoke, as she closed the folding-doors of the inner room where Lucy lay. David, who was crouching over the fire in the sitting-room, whither the nurse had banished him for a while, after the operation, sprang up, and disappeared in an instant. Those faint, distant sounds of anguish which had been in his ear for half an hour or more, ever since the doctors had departed, declaring that everything was satisfactorily over, had been more than his manhood could bear.

He returned in an incredibly short s.p.a.ce of time with a young surgeon, who at once administered another injection of morphia.

'A highly sensitive patient,' he said to David, 'and the nerves have, no doubt, been badly cut. But she will do now.'

And, indeed, the moaning had ceased. She lay with closed eyes--so small a creature in the wide bed--her head and face swathed in bandages. But the breathing was growing even and soft. She was once more unconscious.

The doctor touched David's hand and went, after a word with the nurse.

'Won't you go into the next room, sir, and have your tea? Mrs.

Grieve is sure to sleep now,' said the nurse to him in her compa.s.sion.

He shook his head, and sat down near the foot of the bed. The nurse went into the dressing-room a moment to speak to Dora, who was doing some unpacking there, and he was left alone with his wife.

The sounds of the street came into the silent room, and every now and then he had a start of agony, thinking that she was moving again--that she was in pain again. But no, she slept; her breath came gently through the childish parted lips, and the dim light--for the nurse had drawn the curtains on the lengthening April day--hid her pallor and the ghastliness of the dressings.