"Me dear," retorted the admiral, "it's no laughing matter. Honestly, I'm sorry I ever sired the fellow. But never you mind; just you keep your courage up, and it'll all come out right in the long run." "I'm keeping my courage up all right," said Aliette, still laughing; for, somehow or other, Julia's illness had made her own affairs seem rather petty. 4 After ten days of bed, the patient insisted on seeing Mrs. Sanderson. "Sir Heron advises a few months in the country," she told that secretarial automaton. "I shall take a furnished house; the bigger the better. You'd better write to Hampton's and ask for particulars. It mustn't be more than forty miles from town, so that my son can run down for week-ends. You'll have to come with me, and I shall take all the servants." "Sir Heron says we must humor her," said Aliette, consulting Ronnie over dinner. "He says that if she wants a big house, she must have a big house. Nurse seems to think Sussex would be the best place." "But, Alie, is she really fit to be moved?" "Sir Heron says he wouldn't risk it with any one else, but that with her constitution it's the best thing we can do." Ronnie agreed. His mother's recovery appeared so rapid, her good spirits were so infectious, that he had already persuaded himself of her ultimate cure. Of the diabetic complication, definitely diagnosed at last, neither he nor Aliette was informed, nurse and specialist being alike constrained to secrecy by a patient whose brain had begun to function so masterfully, even under the reduced doses of morphia, that they were afraid to cross her will. For now that the hemorrhage had eliminated all possibility of self-deception from her imagination; now that she realized--despite Sir Heron's confident reassurances--how at the best she could only live two years, at the worst a bare six months, the plan, the final plan for Aliette's release, had taken concrete shape in Julia's brain. Wilberforce's revelations about the Carrington case had stuck in her memory. Carrington, according to Wilberforce, had been broken by the press. She, Julia, wielded a more enduring weapon. It was strange, very strange, to lie there, on one's own bed, surrounded by one's own cherished furniture; and knowing one's self doomed, yet know one's self capable of wielding a weapon--could one but forge it--which would outlast death itself. Yet could she, an ill woman, a woman who had never known the financial need for working swiftly, hope to forge her weapon, her sword of the written word, within six months? "Yes," she decided, ruminating one late afternoon behind the warm darkness of closed eyelids, "yes, it can just be done."