“_He_ never got wounded,” thought the sick man. “Captain,” he said presently, “these rooms seem to be full of--pleasant things. Who sent them all?” “Them geraniums and other greens? Oh, the ladies of the mission, every mother’s daughter of ’em, married and single, young an’ old. Jellies? Lord! Yes. Jellies enough to stock a branch grocery. What there _is_ in the female mind, come to sickness, that takes it out in jellies”--mused the captain. “I’ve taken solid comfort out of this screen,” said Bayard gratefully. “I did suffer with the light before. Who sent that?” “That’s Jane Granite’s idee,” replied the captain. “She seems to be a clever girl. Took an old clo’es-horse and some rolls of wall paper they had in the house. They give fifteen cents a roll for that paper. It’s kinder tasty, don’t you think? ’Specially that cherubim with blue wings settin’ on a basket of grapes.” “That reminds me. I see--some Hamburg grapes,” said Bayard, with the indifferent air of a man who purposely puts his vital question last. He pointed to a heaping dish of hothouse fruit and other delicacies never grown in Windover. The captain replied that those come from the Boston gentleman; they’d kept coming all along. He thought she said there was a card to ’em by the name of-- “Worcester?” asked the sick man eagerly. That was it. Worcester. “He hasn’t been here, has he? The gentleman hasn’t called to see me?” The nurse shook his head, and Bayard turned his own away. He would not have believed that his heart would have leaped like that at such a little thing. He felt like a sick boy, sore and homesick with the infinite longing for the love of kin. It was something to know that he was not utterly forgotten. He asked for one of the Boston pears, and ate it with pathetic eagerness. “There’s been letters,” said the captain; “but the doctor’s orders are agin your seeing ’em this week. There’s quite a pile. You see, its bein’ in the papers let folks know.” “In the papers! _What_ in the papers?” “What do you s’pose?” asked the captain proudly. “A fellar don’t swim out in the undertow off Ragged Rock to save a d---- fool of a drunken fisherman every day.” “I’ll be split and salted!” added the fisherman-nurse, “if we didn’t have to have a watchman here three nights when you was worst, to keep the reporters off ye. Thirteen Windover fellars volunteered for the job, and they wouldn’t none of ’em take a cent for it. They said they’d set up forty nights for you.”