"I insisted," she said quietly, and he guessed that the doctor was not to be blamed.

"But," he went on, "it couldn't have happened except through an injury.

You've had no injury that I can think of--"

"No, of course I haven't," she said rapidly. "But these things seem to happen without cause, don't they? Anyway, we won't believe it until we've got to. I've been ill for months, and noticed things. I've been an awful fool. But I didn't think it was dangerous, and--I don't think I'd have cared much if I had known."

The next day confirmed the first doctor's opinion. Marcella was a little incredulous. It did not seem to her that she was ill enough to be in danger. It was only when the doctors advised immediate operation that the horror and terror of it came flooding in upon her.

"Louis, we'll tell them what we think about it to-morrow, please," she said.

They went back to Mrs. King's almost in silence. Both of them seemed as creatures walking in a dream. With one accord they looked at each other when they got back in the room. Mrs. King, anxious-eyed, was talking to someone in the kitchen. To avoid having to talk to her they went up on the roof. The city rumbled beneath their feet, very, very much alive.

Everything seemed to be blatantly alive, flaunting its bounding life at them. They sat down on the coping.

Without warning she clung to him and began to cry.

"Louis--please don't let me be chopped up," she sobbed. He held her as though he would s.n.a.t.c.h her out of life and pain and danger. But he did not know what to say.

"Louis, I hate my body to push itself into notice like this," she cried after awhile. "I always did--as a child, and when Andrew was coming, I hated you to see me--like that--Oh and Louis, I can't die--yet--"

"My darling, you're cracking me up!" he cried. "But don't think of dying. Surgeons don't let people die nowadays! You can't die. You're too much alive. You'd fight any illness--"

They sat trying to think some alleviation into their misery. Presently she s.n.a.t.c.hed herself away from him.

"It's such a beastly, slinking sort of way to die! In a bed--sick and ill! Why can't they have wars--so that I could die quick on a battlefield? You wouldn't have time to be getting cold beforehand, then.

Louis, it's like father, lying in bed till his poor heart was drowned.

Louis--Oh--"

She stopped, breathless. Her eyes narrowed; she was thinking deep down.

"I wonder if it's--necessary?"

He shook himself impatiently.

"How can pain and illness ever be necessary?"

"They may be--perhaps not to the sufferer, you know," she said, and would not explain what she meant. She was seeing pictures of herself praying for weakness--and of burning Feet--

"I wish Andrew had come with us. Is there time to send for him?" she said presently.

"Every day is important now," he said, choked.

"Yes. I've not to be sentimental," she said, and tried not to grieve him as she remembered very vividly her own sick misery when her father and mother were ill and there was nothing she could do.

But even as she tried to be brave little fears would crop up, little jets of horror burst out and wring words from her lips.

"Louis, it's the beastliness of it, you know," she cried. "Imagine something taking possession of your body against your will. I hate that.

Like a madman seizing hold of you--like that gorse being burnt out and growing up and breaking through other things that tried to grow--"

Louis was dumb. After awhile, when she had thought and thought again, she said:

"I'm a wretched coward to say these things to you. It makes it harder for you. But I can't help it. Kraill was right when he said I'd got to cracking-point. If I were heroic I'd lie down and be a beautiful invalid, waiting for a happy release. It would be easier for you if I could. Louis, I just can't. It wouldn't be honest. If I die, it won't be a beautiful spectacle, my dear. I'll fight every inch of the way!

There's such a lot of me to kill. I'm so alive, and I love to be alive.

It--it won't be dignified--"

"Oh G.o.d, I wish I were a Christian, or a theosophist, or something, and believed people went on!" he groaned.

"I don't want to go on anywhere else," she said. "I want to go on here with you and Andrew. And I want to see Dr. Angus and Aunt Janet and all the others at Lashnagar--and--No, I don't want to see him," she added, and thought again for a while in silence. "I don't need to--"

He looked at her quickly, and said nothing.

"Louis, do you think I've been wrong? I remember I said something to Kraill about not wanting to die, though it seemed worlds away then. And he said: 'It seems to me that you take too much on yourself. Are you the ultimate kindliness of the world?' Perhaps it will be better for Andrew if I'm not there--Oh, but that's morbid!"

"It is," he said decidedly. "And you're not going to die--"

She broke in quickly: "Just think if this had happened last year! I'd have been frantic for fear of leaving you and Andrew. Why, I would never have dared to go to the hospital, for fear of what might happen to you while I was there. And now I'm not a bit afraid of that."

"Then don't be afraid at all. Look here, let's talk as if you're not my Marcella at all, dear. Let's talk as if you were someone we're both keen about. Can't you see that you're in very little danger, really? You're so young, and so tremendously hard--"

She tried to make him think she was rea.s.sured, but a little later the fear cropped out again.

"If I die," she said quietly, "what are you going to do? No, don't look miserable about it. I'm miserable enough for two of us, goodness knows.

But people have been known not to wake up after an operation, haven't they?"

"Just as they've been known to be run over by a taxi," he said.

"Yes. Well then, let's try to be quite unemotional about this stranger called Marcella that we're both keen about. If she did happen to finish up--out of sheer cussedness and desire to make a sensation, next week, you'd be the victim of a ghost, Louis! I'd simply have to be back to see what you're up to! You know what a managing sort of person Marcella is, don't you?"

He made a desperate effort to be unemotional, and presently he said, very decidedly:

"I know now what I'm going to do, old girl! I absolutely refuse to allow illness to go on! There! That's a challenge to the Almighty, if He likes to take it--"

She laughed gently, with tears in her eyes.

"I feel helpless. And I'm fed up with feeling helpless. That socialization of knowledge has got to begin, or I'll--Oh. I don't know!

Look at the idiocy of it! Here we are in the twentieth century, and people are dying like flies all over the show. Why, there's no room for houses because there's so much room needed for grave-yards! And--even if they don't die, they're ill, most of them. And I'm not going to have it!"

"Louis! What are you going to do?" she said, staring at him, taken out of her fear by his enthusiasm. "I've never seen you like this before."

"No. I never have been. But this business of illness has just come and touched me on the raw, you see! You ought not to be ill. It's waste and lunacy to think of it. And I--ten years of my life wasted by a neurosis!

And your father, and Lord knows how many millions more! I'll tell you this much, Marcella! Before five years have gone by I'll be in the battlefield against illness, and I'll be d.a.m.ned if illness won't have to look out! I loathe it, just as you do! I resent it! I'm going to stop it. Listen, old girl, as soon as you're out of that hospital, you're off to England, and I'm going to the Pater, and I'm going on my knees to beg him to give me another go at the hospital. I've got to get my tools ready, you know--"

"Do you think your father will?"

"He'll be sceptical. I should if I were he. I've been such a bounder to him in the past. But if he's too sceptical to help--well, I'll go to Buckingham Palace and ask King George to lend me the money! I should think he'd be jolly glad to think there was a chance of wiping out illness for ever."

Tears brimmed over: it was when she saw the eternal child in Louis that she loved him most, and was most afraid for him; not afraid now that he would waste himself again, but afraid that he would never touch the mountain-tops at which he was aiming.

"Yes, we'll go home," she said dreamily. "And I'll take you on Lashnagar--and we'll see them all again. I'll ask Uncle to give us the money to take us home. This wretched illness will take all we have."