‘We all have our trials—­high and low.’

‘That reminds me,’ said Lady Maulevrier, looking up at her, ’your husband said you were in trouble.  What did that mean?’

’Sickness in the house, my lady.  A brother of mine that went to America to make his fortune, and seemed to be doing so well for the first five or six years, and wrote home such beautiful letters, and then left off writing all at once, and we made sure as he was dead, and never got a word from him for ten years, and just three weeks ago he drops in upon us as we was sitting over our tea between the lights, looking as white as a ghost.  I gave a shriek when I saw him, for I was regular scared out of my senses.  “Robert’s ghost!” I cried; but it was Robert himself, come home to us to die.  And he’s lying upstairs now, with so little life in him that I expect every breath to be his last.’

‘What is his complaint?’

’Apathy, my lady.  Dear, dear, that’s not it.  I never do remember the doctor’s foreign names.’

‘Atrophy,’ perhaps.

’Yes, my lady, that was it.  Happen such crack-jaw words come easy to a scholar like your ladyship.’

‘Does the doctor give no hope?’

’Well, no, my lady.  He don’t go so far as to say there’s no hope, though Robert has been badly so long.  It all depends, he says, upon the rallying power of the constitution.  The lungs are not gone, and the heart is not diseased.  If there’s rallying power, Robert will come round, and if there isn’t he’ll sink.  But the doctor says nature will have to make an effort.  But I have my own idea about the case,’ added the landlady, with a sigh.

‘What is your idea?’

’That our Robert was marked for death when he came into this house, and that he meant what he said when he spoke of coming home to die.  Things had gone against him for the last ten years in America.  He married and took his wife out to a farm in the Bush, and thought to make a good thing out of farming with the bit of brass he’d saved at heeam.  But America isn’t Gert Langdale, you see, my lady, and his knowledge stood him in no stead in the Bush; and first he lost his money, and he fashed himself terrible about that, and then he lost a child or two, and then he lost his wife, and he came back to us a broken-hearted man, with no wish to live.  The doctor may call it atrophy, but I will call it what the Scripture calls it, a broken and a wounded spirit.’

‘Who is your doctor?’

‘Mr. Evans, of Ambleside.’

‘That little half-blind old man!’ exclaimed her ladyship.  ’Surely you have no confidence in him?’

’Not much, my lady.  But I don’t believe all the doctors in London could do anything for Robert.  Good nursing will bring him round if anything can; and he gets that, I can assure your ladyship.  He’s my only brother, the only kith and kin that’s left to me, and he and I were gay fond of each other when he was young.  You may be sure I don’t spare any trouble, and my good man thinks the best of his larder or his celler hardly good enough for Robert.’