I went up to Hampstead that afternoon to see him.

I found him in a back room, at the top of the house, sitting by the fire in an easy-chair, wrapped in a blanket.  He was as thin as a lath and his face was a bright yellow.  The very whites of his eyes were yellow.  I would have said you never saw a more miserable object, but that Jevons was not miserable.  He was happy.  And as far as his devastated condition would allow him, he looked happy.  This face, yellow with jaundice, was doing its best to smile.  The smile was a grimace, not an affair of the lips at all, but of the deep crescent lines drawn at right angles to them.  Still, he was smiling.  In a sort of ecstasy.

He was smiling at Viola, who sat in the chair facing him on the other side of the hearth.  She looked as if she had been there for ages.  Also, as if she had been sitting up all night.

She was smiling too, straight at Jevons.  What I saw was the beatitude of his response.

He tried to smile at me, too, as I came in, but the effort was a failure.  He wasn’t really a bit glad to see me.  Viola got up and left me with him.  I wasn’t to stay with him for more than ten minutes, she said.  It was the first day he had been allowed to sit up.

I sat with him for fifteen minutes.

He was lodged, as before, in one room; but its domestic character was disguised by many ingenious devices giving you the idea that it was nothing but his study.

Well, there he was, haggard and yellow with jaundice, utterly pitiable as to his appearance and surroundings; and yet he looked at me in, positively, a sort of triumph, as much as to say, “Yes.  Here I am.  And you, with all your superior resources, haven’t managed half so well.”

And I thought that he (not knowing Viola so well as I did) was suffering from a lamentable delusion.

He said she had been awfully good to him.  But it was rather hard luck on him, wasn’t it, that he should have gone and turned this beastly colour?

I said rather loftily I didn’t suppose it mattered to Viola what colour he turned.

(What could it matter to her?)

She came in presently and took me down to her sitting-room, and gave me tea.  She owned to having sat up three nights with Jevons.  She couldn’t have believed it possible that anybody could be so ill.  For three days and three nights the poor thing hadn’t been able to keep anything down—­not even a drop of water.  But to-day she had been feeding him on the whites of eggs beaten up with brandy.

She seemed to me to be obsessed with Jevons’s illness, and I made her come out with me for ten minutes for a blow on the Heath.  I tried to lead her mind to other things, and she listened politely.  Then there was silence, and presently I felt her arm slide into mine (she had these adorable impulses of confidence).

“Furny,” she said, “what does jaundice come from?”