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."

There and then she wanted to begin. Then and there, opening her eyes, she attempted to untuck the bedclothes. But her arms, weak, almost powerless, refused their task. Even as she moved them, the ghost of a remembered pain stabbed at her left lung; and, frightened by remembrance of past agony, she desisted. "Not yet," she thought, "not yet. I must rest for another week, perhaps for another fortnight. Fresh air might cure these lungs of mine, and make me well again. What a fool I am to deceive myself! That must be the consumption. Consumption always cheats its victims with the hope of life."

And she fell to remembering Aubrey Beardsley, to comparing herself with him, to conjuring up mental pictures of his "handkerchief-parties," as he used to call them, when he would break off in the midst of some gay anecdote, rush--silk pressed to mouth--from the room, and return, gayer than ever, to carry on the game of make-believe with his cronies. "Brave!" mused Julia, "but I mustn't be brave like that. For Ronnie's sake I must husband every ounce of my strength. Above all, I must find a house in the country."

The taking of that country-house, even though it had to be accomplished by proxy, served in no small way to distract her mind from gloomier thoughts. Mrs. Sanderson's inquiry had brought many answers, and Julia used to sit up in bed of a morning, her secretary in attendance, buff "particulars" from the house-agent's littered like cards on the heavily embroidered eiderdown. These perused, she would send for Aliette. "Take a car," she used to say. "Charge it to my account. The brougham's too slow for long journeys. This lot," handing over a packet of slips, "look as though they might do. All the rest are hopeless."

For the best part of a week, Aliette motored about the southern counties. April was almost May; the blossomed countryside a dream of green and white beauty. Rushing lonely through the sunlit air, hedges, fields, and orchards streaming by, it seemed impossible that any breathing creature should be near to death. Her mood expanded to the expanding summer, so that she forgot her personal troubles, too, in the sheer fun of her quest, and enjoyed every minute of it, from the setting-out of midday to the evening consultations with her "mother-in-law" and Ronnie about the places she had seen.

Finally, their choice narrowed itself down to two places--one, a modern mansion perched high on the slopes that overlook Reigate and Dorking; the other, an old-fashioned brown stone house roofed with great slabs of Sussex slate, midway between Horsham and the sea.

"Let it be Sussex," decided Julia; and to Daffadillies, as the brown stone house called itself, some fortnight later, they went.