For Mrs. Lucas, driving out with her pony for the third time in the Forest, the pony--white, with extreme age--had fallen, and lay still, and a March storm had come sweeping up from the Solent. So that there was the pneumonia. “And the only reason I tell you all this,” Pauline said, “is to make you very quiet and good, and careful not to knock things over, because it’s such a tiny box of a place, and you’re such a clumsy creature, and falling crockery is so bad for a weak heart. I should say it’s worse than sudden deaths or runaway marriages....” But Dudley Leicester had no chance of breaking his mother-in-law’s china. He was fond of standing before her little mantelshelf, and, with a motion of his shoulder-blades, knocking her blue vases into the fender, and his dismal contrition then had always been almost worse for Mrs. Lucas’s nerves than the actual crash and collision. He had no chance, because the little cottage was full to overflowing. There were two nurses in attendance; there were a doctor and a specialist at the moment of the Leicesters’ arrival, and there was only one spare bedroom, and only one servant. And there was no other dwelling-place within seven miles. Dudley Leicester was left to imagine that it was the cold, calm, closely-lipped nurses in their white aprons that seemed to stand out so stiffly, to take up so much space, and with their rustlings so to fill the tiny house--that it was they who sent the quite dismal Dudley Leicester back to town. But no doubt, though she never let him suspect it, or the shadow of it, it was Pauline. With the secret consciousness that his presence, though he never went near the sick-room, was a constant torture to her mother--it was Pauline who really ejected him from the cottage, who put against the fact that he was willing to sleep on the sofa or in the loft over the white pony’s stable the other fact--that Ann, the servant, was terribly overworked already, with so many extra beds to make, meals to cook, and plates to wash up. In fact, gay and brave and pleading, Pauline put her hands on her husband’s chest and pushed him backwards out of the crowded house. And he never realized that it was she who did it. IV