Once again, as July sped, Julia Cavendish stumbled in her race with death. The sustained effort of the past weeks had exhausted her vitality. Her brain wearied of its weapon-forging; and for a week she stayed it from the anvil.

But her brain, once released from its secret task, felt the impulse--as is the habit of creative brains--to burden itself with other tasks. The imaginative power, no longer under definite control, grew fearful, painting devils on every wall. She summoned Sir Heron Baynet from London, questioned and cross-questioned him about her disease. "You're a mind-specialist, inter alia?" was one of her questions. "Tell me, do you believe that a healthy mind can triumph over an unhealthy body?"

"It depends on the quality of the mind," Sir Heron humored her. "In your own case, I should say that the sheer will to be cured has done more than all my drugs. But don't overdo the work."

That--since all she now lived for was to bring her work to its conclusion--frightened her but the more. Torn between the desire for work and the fear lest, overworking, she should too soon pay the inevitable penalty, she drove her brain once more to the anvil--hammering, hammering, hammering at her sword of the written word till even Mrs. Sanderson dared to protest with her.

"Your business is to type, not to argue," said Julia grimly; and once again, openly this time, she began to work o' nights--so that it was a novelist nearer than she had ever been to a nervous breakdown who said to her "daughter-in-law" one afternoon as they took their tea in the book-shelved morning-room overlooking the rain-dripped magnificence of the herbaceous borders: "I wonder if I ought to have my family down. They'll be a frightful nuisance, and I sha'n't be able to scribble while they're here. All the same, one has one's duties----"

"I think your first duty is to get quite well," smiled the "daughter-in-law.''

"Perhaps you're right, child." Nervously Julia's tired mind broached another of its secret anxieties. "And your family? Don't you ever feel the need of them?"

"Mollie wrote last week," answered Aliette, burking the main question.

"Yes, but your father, your mother, that other sister of yours? Don't you ever wish that they'd see reason; that they knew the exact truth; that somebody could tell them the inside story of your married life?" The questions came abruptly from the shawled figure in the easy chair.

"Sometimes. Not that the truth would influence mother. Mother was a Roman Catholic, you know, before she married."

"Ah! I'd nearly forgotten that. It's important, very important, because----" Julia, as though she had said too much, checked herself, leaving the other rather mystified. "Still," she went on, "your mother isn't a Roman Catholic now. She'd forgive you if there were a divorce, if you married my son?"

"Yes. I suppose so." The younger woman brushed away the topic. "But mother and I never cared for one another as you and Ronnie care. Mollie and I were the pals in our family."

"Quite so." A sudden plan formulated itself in Julia's troubled brain. "It must be lonely for you down here," she said after a pause. "Wouldn't you like to have your sister Mollie to stay for a week?"

"But wouldn't she be a nuisance?"

"No. I like having young people about me, and besides, I've a reason----"

Again, as though fearful of betraying herself, Julia checked speech. But the next day and the next, work finished, her mind reverted to its plan.

"We might invite young Wilberforce, too," she suggested when Ronnie came down on the Saturday. "That would make you four for tennis."

"And two for match-making," retorted Ronnie, entirely unsuspicious of his mother's real motive.

CHAPTER XXVII