“Every day is important now,” he said, choked.

“Yes.  I’ve not to be sentimental,” she said, and tried not to grieve him as she remembered very vividly her own sick misery when her father and mother were ill and there was nothing she could do.

But even as she tried to be brave little fears would crop up, little jets of horror burst out and wring words from her lips.

“Louis, it’s the beastliness of it, you know,” she cried.  “Imagine something taking possession of your body against your will.  I hate that.  Like a madman seizing hold of you—­like that gorse being burnt out and growing up and breaking through other things that tried to grow—­”

Louis was dumb.  After awhile, when she had thought and thought again, she said: 

“I’m a wretched coward to say these things to you.  It makes it harder for you.  But I can’t help it.  Kraill was right when he said I’d got to cracking-point.  If I were heroic I’d lie down and be a beautiful invalid, waiting for a happy release.  It would be easier for you if I could.  Louis, I just can’t.  It wouldn’t be honest.  If I die, it won’t be a beautiful spectacle, my dear.  I’ll fight every inch of the way!  There’s such a lot of me to kill.  I’m so alive, and I love to be alive.  It—­it won’t be dignified—­”

“Oh God, I wish I were a Christian, or a theosophist, or something, and believed people went on!” he groaned.

“I don’t want to go on anywhere else,” she said.  “I want to go on here with you and Andrew.  And I want to see Dr. Angus and Aunt Janet and all the others at Lashnagar—­and—­No, I don’t want to see him,” she added, and thought again for a while in silence.  “I don’t need to—­”

He looked at her quickly, and said nothing.

“Louis, do you think I’ve been wrong?  I remember I said something to Kraill about not wanting to die, though it seemed worlds away then.  And he said:  ’It seems to me that you take too much on yourself.  Are you the ultimate kindliness of the world?’ Perhaps it will be better for Andrew if I’m not there—­Oh, but that’s morbid!”

“It is,” he said decidedly.  “And you’re not going to die—­”

She broke in quickly:  “Just think if this had happened last year!  I’d have been frantic for fear of leaving you and Andrew.  Why, I would never have dared to go to the hospital, for fear of what might happen to you while I was there.  And now I’m not a bit afraid of that.”

“Then don’t be afraid at all.  Look here, let’s talk as if you’re not my Marcella at all, dear.  Let’s talk as if you were someone we’re both keen about.  Can’t you see that you’re in very little danger, really?  You’re so young, and so tremendously hard—­”

She tried to make him think she was reassured, but a little later the fear cropped out again.

“If I die,” she said quietly, “what are you going to do?  No, don’t look miserable about it.  I’m miserable enough for two of us, goodness knows.  But people have been known not to wake up after an operation, haven’t they?”