Her patient’s eyelids were down.

She proposed to send her name up to Mrs. Adister.

On her return from the poor lady racked with headache and lying little conscious of her husband’s powder-barrel under the bed, Jane found her patient being worried by his official nurse, a farm-labourer’s wife, a bundle of a woman, whose lumbering assiduities he fenced with reiterated humourous negatives to every one of her propositions, until she prefaced the last two or three of the list with a ‘Deary me!’ addressed consolatorily to herself.  She went through the same forms each day, at the usual hours of the day, and Jane, though she would have felt the apathetic doltishness of the woman less, felt how hard it must be for him to bear.

‘Your sister will be with you soon,’ she said.  ’I am glad, and yet I hope you will not allow her to put me aside altogether?’

‘You shall do as you wish,’ said Philip.

‘Is she like Patrick?  Her name is Kathleen, I know.’

‘She is a raw Irish girl, of good Irish training, but Irish.’

‘I hope she will be pleased with England.  Like Patrick in face, I mean.’

‘We think her a good-looking girl.’

‘Does she play? sing?’

‘Some of our ballads.’

‘She will delight my brother.  John loves Irish ballads.’

A silence of long duration fell between them.  She fancied he would like to sleep, and gently rose to slip away, that she might consult with Mrs. Lappett about putting up some tentcover.  He asked her if she was going.  ‘Not home,’ she said.  His hand moved, but stopped.  It seemed to have meant to detain her.  She looked at a white fleece that came across the sun, desiring to conjure it to stay and shadow him.  It sailed by.  She raised her parasol.

His eyelids were shut, and she thought him asleep.  Meditating on her unanswered question of Miss Kathleen’s likeness to Patrick, Jane imagined a possibly greater likeness to her patient, and that he did not speak of his family’s exclamations on the subject because of Kathleen’s being so good-looking a girl.  For if good-looking, a sister must resemble these handsome features here, quiescent to inspection in their marble outlines as a corse.  So might he lie on the battle-field, with no one to watch over him!

While she watched, sitting close beside him to shield his head from the sunbeams, her heart began to throb before she well knew the secret of it.  She had sight of a tear that grew big under the lashes of each of his eyelids, and rolled heavily.  Her own eyes overflowed.

The fit of weeping was momentary, April’s, a novelty with her.  She accused her silly visions of having softened her.  A hasty smoothing to right and left removed the traces; they were unseen; and when she ventured to look at him again there was no sign of fresh drops falling.  His eyelids kept shut.