He came in as early as possible, therefore, for he had had Doctor Smalley in to see her, and the result had been unsatisfactory.

“Heart’s bad,” said the doctor, when they had retired to Willy’s room.  “Leaks like a sieve.  And there may be an aneurism.  Looks like it, anyhow.”

“What is there to do?” Willy asked, feeling helpless and extremely shocked.  “We might send her somewhere.”

“Nothing to do.  Don’t send her away; she’d die of loneliness.  Keep her quiet and keep her happy.  Don’t let her worry.  She only has a short time, I should say, and you can’t lengthen it.  It could be shortened, of course, if she had a shock, or anything like that.”

“Shall I tell the family?”

“What’s the use?” asked Doctor Smalley, philosophically.  “If they fuss over her she’ll suspect something.”

As he went down the stairs he looked about him.  The hall was fresh with new paper and white paint, and in the yard at the rear, visible through an open door, the border of annuals was putting out its first blossoms.

“Nice little place you’ve got here,” he observed.  “I think I see the fine hand of Miss Edith, eh?”

“Yes,” said Willy Cameron, gravely.

He had made renewed efforts to get a servant after that, but the invalid herself balked him.  When he found an applicant Mrs. Boyd would sit, very much the grande dame, and question her, although she always ended by sending her away.

“She looked like the sort that would be running out at nights,” she would say.  Or:  “She wouldn’t take telling, and I know the way you like your things, Willy.  I could see by looking at her that she couldn’t cook at all.”

She cherished the delusion that he was improving and gaining flesh under her ministrations, and there was a sort of jealousy in her care for him.  She wanted to yield to no one the right to sit proudly behind one of her heavy, tasteless pies, and say: 

“Now I made this for you, Willy, because I know country boys like pies.  Just see if that crust isn’t nice.”

“You don’t mean to say you made it!”

“I certainly did.”  And to please her he would clear his plate.  He rather ran to digestive tablets those days, and Edith, surprising him with one at the kitchen sink one evening, accused him roundly of hypocrisy.

“I don’t know why you stay anyhow,” she said, staring into the yard where Jinx was burying a bone in the heliotrope bed.  “The food’s awful.  I’m used to it, but you’re not.”

“You don’t eat anything, Edith.”

“I’m not hungry.  Willy, I wish you’d go away.  What right we got to tie you up with us, anyhow?  We’re a poor lot.  You’re not comfortable and you know it.  D’you know where she is now?”

“She” in the vernacular of the house, was always Mrs. Boyd.

“She forgot to make your bed, and she’s doing it now.”

He ran up the stairs, and forcibly putting Mrs. Boyd in a chair, made up his own bed, awkwardly and with an eye on her chest, which rose and fell alarmingly.  It was after that that he warned Edith.