“It isn’t that I’m really better—­not really,” she said, in answer to his look almost more than to his words, “but the doctor told me that I must get up and dress to-day.  He wants me to go to the hospital this afternoon.”

Her voice was so composed—­so unlike the usual nervous quiver of her speech—­that at first he could only repeat her words in the vague blankness of his surprise.

“To the hospital?  Then you are ill?”

“I asked him not to tell you,” she replied, with a tremor of the lips which had almost the effect of a smile, “he didn’t understand—­he couldn’t, so I wanted you to hear it first from me.  I’ll never be any better—­I’ll never get really well again—­without such an operation—­and he thinks, he says, that it must be at once—­without delay.”

As she spoke she stretched out her hand for a glass of water that stood at her side, and in the movement her wedding ring slipped from her thin finger and rolled to a little distance upon the floor.  Picking it up he handed it back to her, but she placed it indifferently upon the table.  Her attitude, with its dull quiet of sensation, impressed him at the instant almost more than the greater importance of what she told him.  Was it this acceptance of the thing, he wondered, which appeared to rob it of all terror in her mind? and was the dumb resignation in her face and voice, merely an expression of the physical listlessness of despair?  There was about her now that peculiar dignity which belongs less to the human creature than to the gravity of the moment in which he stands; and he remembered vividly that he had never watched any soul in the supreme crisis of its experience without the stirring in himself of a strange sentiment of reverence.  Even the most abandoned was covered in that exalted hour by some last rag of honour.

“Then you have suffered great pain?” he asked, because no other words came to him that he could utter.

“Weeks ago—­yes—­but not now.  It does not hurt me now.”

“And you thought, yourself, that it was so serious as this?”

She shook her head.  “Oh, no, I never thought of it.  When it came I drove it off with brandy.”

The absence in her of any appeal for pity moved him far more than the loudest outcry could have done.

“Poor girl!” he said, and stopped in terror, lest he had obtruded the personal element into a situation which seemed so devoid of feeling.

“It was a pity,” she returned to his surprise very quietly; and without looking at him, she spoke presently in a voice which struck him as having a strange quality of hollowness, “it was a pity; but it can’t be helped.  You might try and try because you’re made that way, but it wouldn’t, in the end, do the very least bit of good.  If I live till to-morrow and get well and come out of the hospital, it will all be over just exactly what it was before.  Not at first, perhaps—­oh, I know, not at first!—­but afterward, when things bored me, the taste would come back again.”