The winter passed; Louis spent Christmas at Lashnagar and then took Marcella and the boy to London.  Marcella was feeling very ill, but he was too happy and too full of his work to notice it.  She was very glad to get back again, to sleep in her father’s old four-poster bed looking out on Ben Grief.  When he had gone back to Edinburgh she spent many wakeful nights, drawn in upon herself, thinking herself to nothingness like a Buddhist monk until pain brought her to realization again.  In those hours she thought much of her father and heard his voice in her ears, saw him standing there before her, clinging to the post as he prayed for strength.  Louis wrote her immense letters:  sometimes in the night she would light her candle and read them with tears blinding her eyes and an unspeaking gratitude in her heart.  She said nothing to Aunt Janet about her illness in Sydney, or about her pain, but one evening the old lady, looking across the firelit hearth, said quietly: 

“I shall outlive you, Marcella.  Seems foolish!  You—­young, all tingling for life and joy, and people to care about you.  I like a last year’s leaf before the wind, dried and dead.  The one shall be taken and the other left.  It seems foolish.”

“How did you know?  Did Louis tell you?” asked Marcella in a low voice.  The pain had been unbearable all day but she had wrapt herself in a great cape of her father’s and taken it out on Lashnagar, where no one could see her, leaving Andrew at the hut with Wullie.  For a long time she had lost consciousness, to waken very cold in the winter dusk.

“No, Louis said nothing.  But I’ve eyes.  You’re marked for death.  I saw it when you came in at the door that night.  Besides, you and I are very much alike, so I understand you.  And you’re getting very much like your mother.”

“I think I’ll see Dr. Angus to-morrow,” said Marcella presently.  “But I don’t think it’s much use.  That’s the worst of being married to an enthusiastic medical student!  You know so much!”

The wood crackled for a while before Aunt Janet spoke.

“We are getting wiped out, Marcella!  Only an old stick like me, who has repressed everything, lives to tell the tale.  I’ve ruled myself never to feel anything.”

“I’m glad I haven’t.  I’d rather be smashed up with pain than be dead.  You see, Aunt Janet, you repressed things and I took them out and walked over them.”

“Maybe I would if I had my time to go over again.  But I don’t know.  It’s a blessing not to feel.  I’m fond of you, you know, but I scarcely felt your going away.  And I don’t suppose I shall feel your dying very much.”

“You care about Andrew,” said Marcella quickly.

“Yes, I care about Andrew,” said Aunt Janet and gathered herself into the past.

The next day Marcella went to see Dr. Angus who was horrified and incredulous, and wired for a specialist from Edinburgh.  Marcella knew it was all useless, and when the specialist went away after talking to Dr. Angus, without saying anything more about operations, she felt very glad.