"I'm sorry you're done for, Sandro," she said. "So's your wife, I'll be bound."
"You both love me so much?" he sneered.
"We've always understood one another," said Aunt Maria.
"I tell you, I love my wife." Aunt Maria made no remark. "And you both think I'm done for? Well, we'll see!"
Aunt Maria looked up with a gleam of new interest in her sharp eyes, so like the eyes of the man on the bed. Quisanté met her glance and understood it; it appealed at once to his malice and to his vanity; it was a foretaste of the wonder he would raise and the applause he would win, if he determined to face the price that might have to be paid for them. He had listened with exasperated impatience to kind Lady Mildmay's pleadings with him, to her motherly insisting on perfect rest for his mind, and to her pathetically hopeful picture of the new interests and the new pleasure he would find in days of rest and peace, with his wife tenderly looking after him. To such charming as that his ears were deaf; they pricked at the faintest sound of distant cheering. It would be something to show even Aunt Maria that he was not done with; what would it not be to show it to the world—and to that wife of his whom he loved and could hold only by his deeds?
"I only know what the doctors say," remarked Miss Quisanté. "They say you must throw up everything."
"You wouldn't have me risk another of those damned strokes, would you?" he asked, the mockery most evident now in his voice and look. "Lady Mildmay implores me to be careful, almost with tears. I suppose my own aunt'll be still more anxious, and my own wife too?"
"Doctors aren't infallible. And they don't know you, Sandro. You're not like other men." Hard as the tone was, his ears drank in the words eagerly. "They don't know how much there is in you."
Again he leant forward and said almost in a whisper,
"May thinks I'm done for?" Aunt Maria nodded. "And she'll nurse me? Take me to some infernal invalids' place, full of bath-chairs, and walk beside mine, eh?" Aunt Maria smiled grimly. "She'll like that, won't she?" he asked.