As before, Mavis called in the most expensive medical advice, which told her that nothing could be done.  It appeared that Harold’s spine had commenced to curve in such a manner that his lungs were seriously affected.  It was only a question of months before the slight thread, by which his life hung, would be snapped.  Mavis knew of many cases in which enfeebled lungs had been bolstered up for quite a long time by a change to suitable climates; she was eager to know if the same held good in her husband’s case.

“Oh yes,” said the great specialist.  “There were parts of South Africa where the veld air was so rarefied that a patient with scarcely any lung at all might live for several years.  But—­”

“But what?” asked Mavis.

“If I may say so, he will never be other than what he now is.  Would it be advisable to prolong—?”

The expression on Mavis’s face stopped him short in the middle of his question.

“Of course, if you’ve decided to send him, it’s quite another matter,” he went on.  “In that case, you cannot be too careful in seeing he has the most reliable attendants procurable.”

Mavis hesitated the fraction of a second before replying: 

“I should go with him.”

It needed only that brief moment for Mavis to make up her mind.  She would do her utmost to prolong her husband’s life; she would accompany him wherever he went to obtain this end.

In making this last resolve, Mavis knew well the trials and discomforts to which she would expose herself.  Her well-ordered days, her present existence, which seemed to run on oiled wheels, the friends and refinements with which she had surrounded herself, the more particularly appealed to her when contrasted with the lean years of her earlier life.  Her days of want, joined to her natural inclinations, had created a hunger for the good things of the earth, which her present opulence had not yet stayed.  She still held out her hands to grasp the beautiful, satisfying things which money, guided by a mind of some force and a natural refinement, can buy.  Therefore, it was a considerable sacrifice for Mavis to give up the advantage she not only possessed, but keenly appreciated, to tend a man who was a physical and mental wreck, in a part of the world remote from civilising influences.  But, together with her grief for the loss of her boy, there lived in her heart an immense and ineradicable remorse for having married her husband from motives of revenge against his family.

Harold’s living faith in her goodness kept these regrets green; otherwise, the kindly hand of time would have rooted them from her heart.

“Do you believe?” Mavis had once asked of her husband on a day when she had been troubled by things of the spirit.

“In you,” he had replied, which was all she could get from him on the subject.

His reply was typical of the whole-hearted reverence with which he regarded her.