"Sara is fancying you are not so well."
"Is she?"
"But she always was given to fancies, you know. Is it right that you should sit up so long the first time of leaving your bed?"
"Yes, I like the change. I was tired of bed. Sit down, Bettina. There are one or two things I want to say to you."
"Are you finding yourself worse?"
"Bettina, I have not been better."
"The doctors have thought you so," she said, after a pause.
"Ay, but I know more of my own state than they can tell me. When the suffering and its signs passed, they leaped to the conclusion that the disease had left me. In a measure, so it has, but they should have remembered in how many of such cases the apparent improvement is all deceit, the forerunner of the end."
Bettina Davenal fully understood the words and what they implied. But she was not a demonstrative woman, and the rubbing together of her white and somewhat bony hands was the sole sign of the inward aching heart.
"And I am thankful for the improvement," added the doctor. "It is not all who are permitted this freedom from pain in their dying hours."