Into the girl's pale cheek came a sudden colour. She lifted her head and her eyes shone. She held out her hand, and all at once it was steady.
"No one else;—no one but me!" she cried.
Oh, the farce was not played out; the curtain was not down. She was still his wife to that audience; it was to her he belonged, to no other.... Desperately she stood on her rights;—the poor, fictitious rights she had purchased with all that pain.
"You can't nurse him," the doctor was saying gently. "You'd break down; you would make yourself ill. You don't know what you would be undertaking."
But Barnaby's mother was on her side.
"Fiddlesticks!" said she. She had brightened unaccountably; in her voice ran a queer little tremor of satisfaction. "Let her make herself ill if she likes. Why shouldn't she? I've no patience with modern vices, calling in hirelings—! A wife's place is with her husband, not quaking outside his door."
Susan was looking bravely in the doctor's doubtful face.
"You can trust me," she said, on her pale lips a wistful flicker that hardly was a smile.—"I too was a—hireling, once. I know how."
She knew he must yield. What man would dare to stop her? What man would dare to dispute her claim? Only Barnaby himself, who might one day laugh at the tragic humour of her assumption. A kind of despairing joy shook her soul, and was blotted in a passionate eagerness of devotion. Barnaby was hurt, perhaps dying, ... and nothing could conjure her from his side.