Page:The Blind Bow-Boy (IA blindbowboy00vanv).pdf/218



On an afternoon in September, Campaspe woke up feeling a little ill, and decided not to go out. She did not, however, send for a physician. Campaspe cherished a peculiar superstition in regard to ill-health. She considered it as a visitation in the nature of a warning, a warning to take arest. Any interference with the course of the complaint she held to be artificial and even vicious. The miraculously prolonged youthful appearance of her mother, who had never permitted a doctor to visit her since the days when she bore her children, confirmed Campaspe in this esoteric belief.

If I had a broken leg, she assured herself, I would call in a surgeon to set it, but a headache or a hemorrhage is natural. Decayed cells are breaking down and need to be replaced, or I am being punished by nature for some misdemeanour. When it is over, and the cells have renewed themselves, I shall be stronger than ever.

She glanced over her mail. A letter from Laura, which she did not open. . . . A postcard from the Duke, with a lithograph in colours of a cottage smothered in rambler roses, and a Nantucket postmark. Inside quotation marks the Duke had writ-