and the doctors had said to me, ‘We'll straighten your boy's legs for you, but he will be in pain all the rest of his life,’ I'd not have let them touch him.
"I seemed to have to tell them that I knew a way. I suppose it would have been sly to sit there and not tell them. I told them, anyhow. But, oh, I can't do it! Go out and put an end to the poor love's happiness. After the time he's had, the war and all. And then he'll have to go back there! I can't! I can't!”
I felt an ecstatic sense of ease. Everything was going to be right. Chris was to live in the interminable enjoyment of his youth and love. There was to be a finality about his happiness which usually belongs only to loss and calamity; he was to be as happy as a ring cast into the sea is lost, as a man whose coffin has lain for centuries beneath the sod is dead. Yet Margaret continued to say, and irritated
