"Oh, I have left off writing letters and reading newspapers, and I forget dates. I know the days are getting shorter, because the dawn is so long coming when I lie awake." "We are in the middle of September," said the doctor, "a charming month for country air--neither too hot nor too cold--the golden mean." "And in six weeks it will be the end of October, and I can go to Rome for the winter!" "You could not do better. We shall build up your constitution in those six weeks. You will be another woman when you leave Sussex." "But, my dearest Vera," protested her aunt, "you can never think of a winter alone in that enormous villa. You will die of ennui." "No, no, Aunt Mildred, I love Rome. The very atmosphere of the place is life to me. I am not afraid of being alone." Dr. Tower shot a significant look at her ladyship, which silenced remonstrance, and no more was said. Two days later Vera found herself on a windy hill in Sussex, under the dominion of the house-doctor and two nurses, and almost as much exposed to the elements as King Lear on the heights near Dover. An eider-down coverlet and a hot-water bottle made the only difference. Lady Okehampton, having sacrificed her own cure to her niece's, went with a mind at ease to join her husband in Yorkshire; an arrangement almost without precedent in their domestic annals. CHAPTER XVII Father Cyprian Hammond returned to his comfortable rooms in the north-west region one rainy autumn evening after a long day in the dreariest abodes of East London. He was almost worn out by the bodily fatigue of tramping those dismal streets with one of his friends and allies, a priest from the Cathedral at Moorfields; and by the mental strain that comes from facing the inscrutable problem of human suffering--the mystery of sorrow and pain, inevitable, unceasing, beyond man's power to help or cure. He had visited the poor in great hospitals where every detail testified to the beneficence of the rich; yet he knew that the comfort and cleanliness of the hospital must needs accentuate the dirt and squalor of the slum to which the patient must return. He sank into his armchair, with a sigh of relief, and was sorry to hear of a visitor, who had called twice that afternoon and would call again after nine o'clock. "Did he leave his card?" Yes, the card was there on the table. "Mr. Claude Rutherford."