“Harriett, I think you ought to see more of your friends, dear.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll want them after I’m gone.”
“I shall never want anybody but you.”
And their time went as it had gone before: in sewing together, reading together, listening to lectures and concerts together. They had told Sarah that they didn’t want anybody to call. They were Hilton Frean’s wife and daughter. “After our wonderful life with him,” they said, “you’ll understand, Sarah, that we don’t want people.” And if Harriett was introduced to any stranger she accounted for herself arrogantly: “My father was Hilton Frean.”
They were collecting his Remains for publication.
Months passed, years passed, going each one a little quicker than the last. And Harriett was thirty-nine.
One evening, coming out of church, her mother fainted. That was the beginning of her illness, February, eighteen eighty-three. First came the long months of weakness; then the months and months of sickness; then the pain; the pain she had been hiding, that she couldn’t hide any more.
They knew what it was now: that horrible thing that even the doctors were afraid to name. They called it “something malignant.” When the friends—Mrs. Hancock, Connie Pennefather, Lizzie, and Sarah—called to inquire, Harriett wouldn’t tell them what it was; she pretended that she didn’t know, that the doctors weren’t sure; she covered it up from them as if it had been a secret shame. And they pretended that they didn’t know. But they knew.
They were talking now about an operation. There was one chance for her in a hundred if they had Sir James Pargeter: one chance. She might die of it; she might die under the anæsthetic; she might die of shock; she was so old and weak. Still, there was that one chance, if only she would take it.