There was something not a little heroic in her struggle with temptations--staying on while every notion she had heretofore considered righteous called to her to go back. Hideous pictures of ruin and discomfort at home floated before her mind. She had to admit she found a certain grim satisfaction in such visions. They would at least prove to Despard how little the modern family is able to dispense with the services of the old-fashioned mother. She was human enough to be eager to prove him wrong in essentials, for in minor matters he had shown himself terribly accurate. With unlimited leisure on her hands she was surprised to find how little enjoyment she derived from her books. She read herself to sleep with a novel every night, but it was enough for her to open one of the more serious works for her mind to rush back to the old domestic problems. Her eyes alone would read the printed page. Her life seemed hideously vacant--empty, as she put it, of all affection; but it was also empty of all machinery--perhaps the greater change of the two. She had no small duties, no orders to give, no mistakes to correct. She was not forbidden to communicate with Despard, and at the end of a week she telegraphed him that she was going home. He came to her at once. “I am doing what I know to be wrong,” she broke out. “I am neglecting my family.” “You are doing what your medical adviser orders.” “Yes,” she answered, “but can you guarantee that nothing will happen in my absence? Will it be any comfort to me, if things go wrong, to say that I was obeying orders?” He did not directly answer this question, which had been largely rhetorical in intention. Instead, he said: “Yes, I suppose you are dreadfully bored.” She checked an impulse toward complete denial. He had stated half the truth. She was bored, but she tried to make him see that there was more than that in her attitude. He, a man and a bachelor, could hardly realize how serious might be the results of a mother’s protracted absence. He had at times a trick--irritating to Mrs. Royce--of replying to something slightly different from the thought one had expressed. He did so now. “And if they do miss you,” he said, “won’t that be a help?” Yes, certainly, it would be a help, and it was perhaps that thought which kept her on day after day--the thought that they were missing her in every detail of life, the belief that the daily service, the common-place sacrifice of an existence like hers could only be realized by its cessation. One reward she had. Her books began to grow more interesting. “It grows better as you get into it,” she explained to one of the nurses, but in her heart she knew the improvement was not in the book.