During this interval of suspense Cicely and Julian were thrown much together.  Every moment that Walden could spare from his parish work, he passed by the side of his beloved, knowing that his presence made her happy, and fearing that these days might be his last with her on earth.  Maryllia herself however seemed to have no such forebodings.  She was wonderfully bright and cheerful, and though her body was so helpless her face was radiant with such perfect happiness that it looked as fair as that of any pictured angel.  Cicely, recognising the nature of the ordeal through which these two lovers were passing, left them as much by themselves as possible, and laid upon Julian the burden of her own particular terrors which she was at no pains to conceal.  And unfortunately Julian did not, under the immediate circumstances, prove a very cheery comforter.

“I hate the knife!” he said, gloomily—­“Everyone is cut up or slashed about in these days—­there’s too much of it altogether.  If ever a fruit pip goes the way it should not go into my interior mechanism, I hope it may be left there to sprout up into a tree if it likes—­I don’t mind, so long as I’m not sliced up for appendicitis or pipcitis or whatever it is.”

“I wonder what our great-grandparents used to do when they were ill?” queried Cicely, with a melancholy stare in her big, pitiful dark eyes.

“They let blood,”—­replied Julian—­“They used to go to the barber’s and get a vein cut at the same time as their hair.  Of course it was all wrong.  We all know now that it was very wrong.  In another hundred years or so we shall find out that twentieth-century surgery was just as wrong.”

Cicely clasped her hands nervously.

“Oh, don’ you think Maryllia will come through the operation all right?” she implored, for about the hundredth time in the course of two days.

Julian looked away from her.

“I don’t know—­and I don’t like to express any opinion about it,”—­ he answered, with careful gentleness—­“But there is danger—­and—­if the worst should happen—–­”

“It won’t happen!  It shan’t happen!” cried Cicely passionately.

“Dear little singing Goblin, I wish you could control fate!” And, taking her hand, he patted it affectionately.  “Everything would be all right for everybody if you could make it so, I’m sure!—­even for me!  Wouldn’t it?”

Cicely blushed suddenly.

“I don’t know,”—­she said—­“I never think about you!”

He smiled.

“Don’t you?  Well,—­perhaps some day you will!  When you are a great prima donna, you will read the poems and verses I shall write about you in all the newspapers and magazines, and you will say as you take kings’ and emperors’ diamonds out of your hair:  ’Who is this fellow?  Ah yes!  I remember him!  He was a chum of mine down in the little village of St. Rest.  I called him Mooncalf, and he called me Goblin.  And—­he was very fond of me!’”