Lily spoke as though the result throughout had been a certainty; her tone to Constance indicated:  “Surely you don’t imagine that I should have told you untruths yesterday morning merely to cheer you up!” The truth was, however, that towards the end of the day nearly every one had believed Federation to be carried.  The result had caused great surprise.  Only the profoundest philosophers had not been surprised to see that the mere blind, deaf, inert forces of reaction, with faulty organization, and quite deprived of the aid of logic, had proved far stronger than all the alert enthusiasm arrayed against them.  It was a notable lesson to reformers.

“Oh!” murmured Constance, startled.  She was relieved; but she would have liked the majority to be smaller.  Moreover, her interest in the question had lessened.  It was her limbs that pre-occupied her now.

“You look tired,” she said feebly to Lily.

“Do I?” said Lily, shortly, hiding the fact that she had spent half the night in tending Dick Povey, who, in a sensational descent near Macclesfield, had been dragged through the tops of a row of elm trees to the detriment of an elbow-joint; the professional aeronaut had broken a leg.

Then Dr. Stirling came.

“I’m afraid my sciatica’s worse, Doctor,” said Constance, apologetically.

“Did you expect it to be better?” said he, gazing at her sternly.  She knew then that some one had saved her the trouble of confessing her escapade.

However, her sciatica was not worse.  Her sciatica had not behaved basely.  What she was suffering from was the preliminary advances of an attack of acute rheumatism.  She had indeed selected the right month and weather for her escapade!  Fatigued by pain, by nervous agitation, and by the immense moral and physical effort needed to carry her to the Town Hall and back, she had caught a chill, and had got her feet damp.  In such a subject as herself it was enough.  The doctor used only the phrase ‘acute rheumatism.’  Constance did not know that acute rheumatism was precisely the same thing as that dread disease, rheumatic fever, and she was not informed.  She did not surmise for a considerable period that her case was desperately serious.  The doctor explained the summoning of two nurses, and the frequency of his own visits, by saying that his chief anxiety was to minimise the fearful pain as much as possible, and that this end could only be secured by incessant watchfulness.  The pain was certainly formidable.  But then Constance was well habituated to formidable pain.  Sciatica, at its most active, cannot be surpassed even by rheumatic fever.  Constance had been in nearly continuous pain for years.  Her friends, however sympathetic, could not appreciate the intensity of her torture.  They were just as used to it as she was.  And the monotony and particularity of her complaints (slight though the complaints were in comparison with their cause) necessarily blunted the edge of compassion.  “Mrs. Povey and her sciatica again!  Poor thing, she really is a little tedious!” They were apt not to realise that sciatica is even more tedious than complaints about sciatica.