A little reluctantly Martin’s father agreed to my terms and the consulting physician was sent for.  He came early the next day—­a beautiful Ellan morning with a light breeze from the sea bringing the smell of new-mown hay from the meadows lying between.

He was an elderly man, and I could not help seeing a shadow cross his clean-shaven face the moment his eyes first fell on me.  They were those tender but searching eyes which are so often seen in doctors, who are always walking through the Valley of the Shadow and seem to focus their gaze accordingly.

Controlling his expression, he came up to my bed and, taking the hand I held out to him, he said: 

“I trust we’ll not frighten you, my lady.”

I liked that (though I cared nothing about my lost title, I thought it was nice of him to remember it), and said I hoped I should not be too restless.

While he took out and fixed his stethoscope (he had such beautiful soft hands) he told me that he had had a daughter of my own age once.

“Once?  Where is she now?” I asked him.

“In the Kingdom.  She died like a Saint,” he answered.

Then he made a long examination (returning repeatedly to the same place), and when it was over and he raised his face I thought it looked still more serious.

“My child,” he said (I liked that too), “you’ve never spared yourself, have you?”

I admitted that I had not.

“When you’ve had anything to do you’ve done it, whatever it might cost you.”

I admitted that also.  He looked round to see if there was anybody else in the room (there was only the old doctor, who was leaning over the end of the bed, watching the face of his colleague) and then said, in a low voice: 

“Has it ever happened that you have suffered from privation and hard work and loss of sleep and bad lodgings and . . . and exposure?”

His great searching eyes seemed to be looking straight into my soul, and I could not have lied to him if I had wished, so I told him a little (just a little) about my life in London—­at Bayswater, in the East End and Ilford.

“And did you get wet sometimes, very wet, through all your clothes?” he asked me.

I told him No, but suddenly remembering that during the cold days after baby came (when I could not afford a fire) I had dried her napkins on my body, I felt that I could not keep that fact from him.

“You dried baby’s napkins on your own body?” he asked.

“Sometimes I did.  Just for a while,” I answered, feeling a little ashamed, and my tears rising.

“Ah!” he said, and then turning to the old doctor, “What a mother will do for her child, Conrad!”

The eyes of Doctor Conrad (which seemed to have become swollen) were still fixed on the face of his colleague, and, speaking as if he had forgotten that I was present with them in the room, he said: 

“You think she’s very ill, don’t you?”