“I wouldn’t quite advise that,” said Mrs Dale.

“It would give him such a delightful start.  And when he found I didn’t die immediately, as of course I ought to do according to rule, he would be so disgusted.”

“It would be very ungrateful, to say the least of it,” said Bell.

“No, it wouldn’t, a bit.  He needn’t come, unless he likes it.  And I don’t believe he comes to see me at all.  It’s all very well, mamma, your looking in that way; but I’m sure it’s true.  And I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll pretend to be bad again, otherwise the poor man will be robbed of his only happiness.”

“I suppose we must allow her to say what she likes till she gets well,” said Mrs Dale, laughing.  It was now nearly dark, and Mrs Dale did not see that Bell’s hand had crept under the bed-clothes, and taken hold of that of her sister.  “It’s true, mamma,” continued Lily, “and I defy her to deny it.  I would forgive him for keeping me in bed if he would only make her fall in love with him.”

“She has made a bargain, mamma,” said Bell, “that she is to say whatever she likes till she gets well.”

“I am to say whatever I like always; that was the bargain, and I mean to stand to it.”

On the following Sunday Lily did get up, but did not leave her mother’s bedroom.  There she was, seated in that half-dignified and half-luxurious state which belongs to the first getting up of an invalid, when Dr Crofts called.  There she had eaten her tiny bit of roast mutton, and had called her mother a stingy old creature, because she would not permit another morsel; and there she had drunk her half glass of port wine, pretending that it was very bad, and twice worse than the doctor’s physic; and there, Sunday though it was, she had fully enjoyed the last hour of daylight, reading that exquisite new novel which had just completed itself, amidst the jarring criticisms of the youth and age of the reading public.

“I am quite sure she was right in accepting him, Bell,” she said, putting down the book as the light was fading, and beginning to praise the story.

“It was a matter of course,” said Bell.  “It always is right in the novels.  That’s why I don’t like them.  They are too sweet.”

“That’s why I do like them, because they are so sweet.  A sermon is not to tell you what you are, but what you ought to be, and a novel should tell you not what you are to get, but what you’d like to get.”

“If so, then, I’d go back to the old school, and have the heroine really a heroine, walking all the way up from Edinburgh to London, and falling among thieves; or else nursing a wounded hero, and describing the battle from the window.  We’ve got tired of that; or else the people who write can’t do it nowadays.  But if we are to have real life, let it be real.”

“No, Bell, no,” said Lily.  “Real life sometimes is so painful.”  Then her sister, in a moment, was down on the floor at her feet, kissing her hand and caressing her knees, and praying that the wound might be healed.