John Damer looked incredulously at Serena, and she saw that he had not understood. She never spoke of it again. * * * * * As the days passed John, fearful always of some new pang, nevertheless asked many questions of Serena when he was alone with her. "Tell me about my wife. She was just twenty when I left her." "She grieved for you with her whole heart." "Did she--marry again? I would rather know if she did. She would have been right to do so in order to have someone to help her to bring up Michael." "She never married again. How could she when you were alive, and in the house." "I forgot." "She hoped to the last you would be completely restored. All the greatest doctors in the world were called in, and they assured her it was only a question of time. Wonderful discoveries had been made in the Great War as to wounds in the head. But they only gradually learnt to apply them. And the years passed and passed." "It would have been kinder to let me die." "Did doctors let people die when you were young?" John shook his head. "They are the same now," she said. "And I suppose Catherine spent her life here, caring for her child, and me, and the poor. She loved the poor." "She cared for you and Michael, and she worked ceaselessly for the cause of the oppressed. She battled for it. She went into Parliament as it was called in those days, as soon as the age for women members was lowered from thirty to twenty-one. She strove for the restriction of the White Slave Traffic, and for safeguarding children from the great disease. Some terrible evils were abated by her determined advocacy. But she always said she did not meet the same opposition the first women doctors did a hundred years ago, or as Florence Nightingale had to conquer when she set out to improve the condition of the soldier in hospital and in barracks, and to reduce the barbarities of the workhouses." "I should have thought she would have been better employed in her own home, that she would have been wiser to leave these difficult subjects, especially the White Slave Traffic--to men." "They had been left to men for a long time," said Serena. * * * * * The day came when he was wheeled out into the garden in the old mahogany wheel chair which his father had used in the last years of his life. Serena was sitting beside him. When was she not beside him! Michael, at a little distance, was talking to two of the gardeners. "Why do Michael and the gardeners wear smock frocks and blue stockings?" "It is so comfortable for one thing, and for another it is the old national peasant dress. We naturally all wish to be dressed alike nowadays, at any rate when we are in the country, just as the Scotch have always done."