Dr. Roland attended the great man to the door; and returned again, taking three steps at a time. “You see,” he cried breathlessly, “I am in charge, though you don’t think much of me. He’s not a mercenary man, he has stayed to pull him through; but we shan’t see much more of Dr. Vereker. There’s the fees saved at a stroke.” “And there’s the women,” said Miss Bethune eagerly, “taking real pleasure in it, and growing fatter and fairer every day.” “The women have done very well,” said the doctor. “I’ll have nothing said against them. It’s they that have pulled him through.” Dr. Roland did not mean to share his triumph with any other voluntary aid. “Well, perhaps that is just,” she said, regretfully; “but yet here is me and Gilchrist hungering for something to do, and all the good pounds a week that might be so useful handed over to them.” Dora listened to all this, half indignant, half uncomprehending. She had a boundless scorn of the “good pounds” of which Miss Bethune in her Scotch phraseology spoke so tenderly. And she did not clearly understand why this particular point in her father’s illness should be so much more important than any other. She heard her own affairs discussed as through a haze, resenting that these other people should think they had so much to do with them, and but dimly understanding what they meant by it. Her father, indeed, did not seem to her any better at all, when she was allowed for a moment to see him as he lay asleep. But Dora, fortunately, thought nothing of the expenses, nor how the little money that came in at quarter day would melt away like snow, nor how the needs, now miraculously supplied as by the ravens, would look when the invalid awoke to a consciousness of them, and of how they were to be provided in a more natural way. It was not very long, however, before something of that consciousness awoke in the eyes of the patient, as he slowly came back into the atmosphere of common life from which he had been abstracted so long. He was surprised to find Dr. Roland at his pillow, which that eager student would scarcely have left by day or night if he could have helped it, and the first glimmering of anxiety about his ways and means came into his face when Roland explained hastily that Vereker came faithfully so long as there was any danger. “But now he thinks a poor little practitioner like myself, being on the spot, will do,” he said, with a laugh. “Saves fees, don’t you know?”