Vassie tried all her wiles to induce him to come to London after the first year in retirement, and at last she was able to assure him that she was not feeling well.  The symptoms were but slight to begin with—­a tinge of rheumatism in one leg, which annoyed without incapacitating her.  The rheumatism became so fierce that the local doctor at last decided it must be neuritis, and when the pain became increasingly acute and frequent he grew alarmed and insisted on a London opinion.  Vassie herself felt a pang of fear, and it was a genuine terror she carried to the grim house in Harley Street a few days later.  The next week she was at Cloom.

Ishmael was shocked at the change in her.  Her hair, that had still shown its old brassy hue when last he had seen her at the time of the fall of the Government, was now a faded grey—­that harsh green-grey that fair hair nearly always turns to on its way to white.  There were hollows under her eyes, and her full mouth looked drawn.  She smiled at his shocked exclamation that he could not suppress.

“Don’t look like that!” she told him.  “The doctor says it’s not hopeless, or wouldn’t be if I’d let them operate.”

“It?  What is it?” asked Ishmael.

“Tuberculosis in the knee.  They want me to have my leg off, and I won’t.  You don’t want me to, do you, Ishmael?  I’d rather die whole if I’ve got to.”

He had felt all his blood rush to his head with the horror of it; his heart pounded sickeningly, a darkness swirled before his eyes.  Vassie linked her arm in his and walked him up and down the lawn in front of the house; from within they could hear the steady rumble of Dan’s voice as he talked to Georgie.  Ishmael could not trust himself to speak.  Vassie was very dear to him, though there had been few caresses between them during their lives.  She stood for something to him no one else ever had, even as she did for John-James.  She had never been popular with women—­Phoebe had feared her, Georgie called her hard and coarse; but to men, though with all her beauty she had been very unattractive to them as far as her sex went, she meant a good deal as a friend.  Judith and she were the only two of the old set who had ever been really intimate, and that was more a curious kinship between them, a mutual respect born out of the strength each recognised in the other’s very different character, than anything warmer.  But to Ishmael and John-James she still held the glow that for them had enwrapped her even in early days when her destiny was only clear cut in her own mind, and when her hardness, commented on by others, was to them an unknown quantity.  When she turned it towards them it became strength, and it did not need caresses to tell Ishmael that what of tenderness she possessed was more for him than for anyone else in the world.  She felt more his equal than she did with Dan, whom she alternately despised, with the kindly despite of a wife, and respected for qualities of brain that were beyond her practical reach.  She always had to explain to Dan, to Ishmael never.  She slipped her arm through his now and gave it a little hug.