"Ann, it doesn't seem a very complimentary thing to say to you, but I look back on the winter you were in India with very great pleasure. We were quite alone, your father and I, for the first time almost since we were married, and he often said, laughing, 'We're never better than when we're alone, Nell.' The letters were such a pleasure--Mark's every morning, Jim's every other morning, a curious scrawl from little Davie once a week, and on Saturday Robbie's letter and your great budget. Oh, Ann, Ann, why was I not deliriously happy? All of you well, all of you prospering, my man beside me, and life full of sunlight." "Ay, Mother, you should have been down on your knees thanking heaven fasting--and if the truth were known I dare say you were. But it's only afterwards you realise how happy you have been!" "Yes, afterwards," said Mrs. Douglas. "It was when you came home from India that you noticed that your father was failing. Living with him I had noticed nothing." "There was hardly anything to notice. He didn't walk with the same light step. He sometimes wondered why his congregation always chose to live up four flights of stairs, and one night he said to me, half laughing, half serious: 'I'm beginning to be afraid of that which is high.' But he was well for a year or two after that, till he had the bad heart attack, and the doctor warned us that it was time he was thinking of giving up his work." Ann got up and stood with both hands on the mantelshelf looking into the fire. "I remember," she went on, "the curious unreal feeling I had, as if the solid earth had somehow given way beneath my feet when I realised that Father's life was in danger. And then, when days and weeks passed, and he didn't seem to get worse, we just put the thought away from us and told ourselves that doctors were often mistaken, and that if he took reasonable care all would be well." "He was only sixty-one," Mrs. Douglas said, "and the doctors assured us that if he gave up preaching he might have years of fairly good health. He had worked himself done. Twenty-two years in Glasgow had been too much for him."