There was a silence in the consulting-room. The great physician sat back in his chair, and sighed softly to himself. No doctor likes to give an unfavourable verdict, and he was no exception to the rule. The pale-faced woman in the chair opposite him sat thinking hard.
‘Then you think, Doctor,’ she said at length, ‘that if I do as you suggest there may be—a chance?’
‘Certainly I do, Mrs Linton. I wish you had come to me sooner, for then it would have been easier. As it is, I consider that if you will do as I have said, it is more than probable that you will be cured finally, even though it may take a long time. You have let things go very far, but if you will go to the Sanatorium at the Sonnalpe, and put yourself completely into the hands of the doctors there, I think you have a very good chance indeed of recovery.’
Mrs Linton nodded. She had the air of only half-listening to what he was saying, and he wondered what was passing through her mind.
Suddenly she looked up. ‘You see, Doctor, I have more than myself to consider. I told you I am a widow. But I have two girls—Gillian is fifteen, and Joyce is fourteen. We have no relations in England to whom I could send them while I am away, so if I go, it means boarding-school.’