Louis suspected nothing; he was working very hard for his first examination the week before Easter and she would not have him worried; she wrote to him every day, though writing grew more and more difficult.  She fought desperately against being an invalid and staying in bed, but at last she had to give way; Dr. Angus came every day and talked to her for hours; sometimes he gave her morphia; once or twice when the pain had stranded her almost unbreathing on a shore of numbness and exhaustion she wished that she had died in the hospital in Sydney:  but not for long; in spite of the pain she wanted to live.  Once or twice, when all was quiet, and the pain was having its night-time orgy with her, she cried out in the unbearable agony of it.  She would have no one with her at nights, but Aunt Janet’s uncanny penetration guessed at the pain and she made Dr. Angus leave morphia tablets for her.  At first, though they were at her hand, she refused them.

“I don’t want to waste time in unconsciousness,” she said once.  Later, she grew glad to waste time:  she understood how her father used to pray for drugs when he was too tired to pray for courage in those weary nights of his.  Another time she said that it was cowardly:  Louis, in his whisky days, had been seeking anesthesia from painful thoughts; she was too proud to seek it for a painful body.  She tried hard, too, to keep shining Kraill’s conception of her courage; she did not realize that he would never know, however much she gave way:  always, for her, he lived just on the threshold of her consciousness.

One day when the doctor was sitting beside her and she had got out of a maze of pain into a buoyant sea of bodily unconsciousness, she talked to him about his letter in which he had grieved at his inadequacy.  Then she told him about Louis, and about Kraill, for she thought it might encourage him to know how the miracle of healing had come about.

“He wrote to me this morning, doctor,” she said.  “Will you feel under my pillow and get the letter?  I know he wouldn’t mind your reading it.”

The doctor unfolded the thick bundle of pages and read—­and as he read he saw that the words were all blurred by tears, and guessed that they were certainly not tears shed by the exuberant young man who had written the letter.

“Three cheers, old girl.  The week of torture is past!  I know I got through.  I simply sailed through.  My brain is a fifty times better machine than it was seven years ago.  And they’re accommodating at these Scotch medical schools.  I told ’em I’d got through part of my Final in London before the bust-up came, and the Dean sent for me to-day and said it seemed a pity for me to slog at the donkey-work again, when I knew it.  So we talked it over, and he says I ought to do the Final next year.  And then, Marcella, look out!  I’ve told you I’ve laid down my challenge to sickness!  I’ll have it whacked before I die.  I can’t see why anyone should die