Then this thing happened.
He had caught cold playing golf, it had gone to his chest, and he had had a cough that he couldn't shake off.
He had always been strong and healthy, and had no opinion of doctors; but at last at his wife's persuasion he had consented to see one.
It was a shock to him, a fearful shock, to learn that there was tubercle in both his lungs and that his only chance of life was to go immediately to a sanatorium.
The specialist he saw then told him that he might be able to go back to work in a couple of years, but two years had passed and Dr Lennox advised him not to think of it for at least a year more.
He showed him the bacilli in his sputum, and in an X-ray photograph the actively diseased patches in his lungs.
He lost heart.
It seemed to him a cruel and unjust trick that fate had played upon him.
He could have understood it if he had led a wild life, if he had drunk too much, played around with women or kept late hours.
He would have deserved it then.
But he had done none of these things. It was monstrously unfair.
Having no resources in himself, no interest in books, he had nothing to do but think of his health.
It became an obsession.
He watched his symptoms anxiously.
They had to deprive him of a thermometer because he took his temperature a dozen times a day.
He got it into his head that the doctors were taking his case too indifferently, and in order to force their attention used every method he could devise to make the thermometer register a temperature that would alarm; and when his tricks were foiled he grew sulky and querulous.
But he was by nature a jovial, friendly creature, and when he forgot himself he talked and laughed gaily; then on a sudden he remembered that he was a sick man and you would see in his eyes the fear of death.
At the end of every month his wife came up to spend a day or two in a lodging-house nearby.
Dr Lennox did not much like the visits that relatives paid the patients, it excited and unsettled them.
It was moving to see the eager-ness with which Henry Chester looked forward to his wife's arrival; but it was strange to notice that once she had come he seemed less pleased than one would have expected.
Mrs Chester was a pleasant, cheerful little woman, not pretty, but neat, as commonplace as her husband, and you only had to look at her to know that she was a good wife and mother, a careful housekeeper, a nice, quiet body who did her duty and interfered with nobody.
She had been quite happy in the dull, domestic life they had led for so many years, her only dissipation a visit to the pictures, her great thrill the sales in the big London shops; and it had never occurred to her that it was monotonous.
It completely satisfied her.
Ashenden liked her.
He listened with interest while she prattled about her children and her house in the suburbs, her neighbours and her trivial occupations.
On one occasion he met her in the road.
Chester for some reason connected with his treatment had stayed in and she was alone.
Ashenden suggested that they should walk together.
They talked for a little of indifferent things.
Then she suddenly asked him how he thought her husband was.
'I think he seems to be getting on all right.'
'I'm so terribly worried.'
'You must remember it's a slow, long business.
One has to have patience.'
They walked on a little and then he saw she was crying.
'You mustn't be unhappy about him,' said Ashenden gently.
'Oh, you don't know what I have to put up with when I come here.
I know I ought not to speak about it, but I must. I can trust you, can't I?'
'Of course.'
'I love him.
I'm devoted to him.
I'd do anything in the world I could for him.
We've never quarrelled, we've never even differed about a single thing.
He's beginning to hate me and it breaks my heart.'
'Oh, I can't believe that. Why, when you're not here he talks of you all the time.
He couldn't talk more nicely.
He's devoted to you.'
'Yes, that's when I'm not here.
It's when I'm here, when he sees me well and strong, that it comes over him.
You see, he resents it so terribly that he's ill and I'm well.