"To be sure. Well, I'll drive you down in my car to get it, if you like, and then I can take it up to the Hospital. I've got to go there again tonight."
"Oh, thank you."
The doctor liked the pleased gratitude in Grace's voice.
"I want so much to know how Sir Piers Vivian is," she said presently.
The doctor shook his head.
"A question of time, you know, when there's been a stroke—at that age. He doesn't rally very much, either. And the brain, Miss Jones, is clouded. We can't deny that it's clouded."
"Oh, poor Lady Vivian!"
"She knows it as well as I do. Doesn't let on, you know, but she's never been deluded from the first. And there she is all day, in the room, you know, except just when he's sleeping, reading to him, and talking quite cheerfully and trying to get him to take a pleasure in some little thing or other. I've never seen her break down, and we doctors see that sort of thing when other people don't sometimes. But she's been under a strain for a long while now—oh, before he got ill—and yet she carries on somehow. Ah, breeding is a wonderful thing, Miss Jones. There have been Vivians at Plessing for more generations than I can count, and she was a Trevellyan. They're from these parts, too, though it's a West Country name. I may be an old snob, Miss Jones, but I was brought up to reverence those whom God Almighty had set in high places, and the Vivians of Plessing have always stood to me for the highest in the land. A pity there isn't a son there!"
"Yes."
"There are cousins, of course. Sir Piers has a brother with children. But one would have liked the direct line—and for her to leave Plessing, it seems hard. If there'd only been a boy!"