Owing to various accidents, similar in their results, though differing in character, almost a week elapses from the first breaking out of Byng's malady before the arrival of either the hospital nurse or of Mrs. Byng. When the latter event occurs, Mrs. Le Marchant retires from her post at the sick man's bedside with the same unostentatious matter-of-factness with which she had assumed it, and Elizabeth is no longer alone. But to set against this advantage is the counterbalancing evil that, after the arrival of Byng's mother, she can no longer steal out, as she had before done a hundred times a day, to his door, to glean fragments of tidings from any outcomer thence. She is never able to repeat those little surreptitious excursions after that occasion when Mrs. Byng, coming suddenly out upon her, passes her with such speaking, if silent, hostility and scorn in her tired and grief-stricken eyes, that the luckless spy slinks back sobbing to her own tender mother; and there Jim, flying out a while after to carry them a crumb of reassurance, finds them, to his indignation, mingling their bitter tears. Whatever else his faults may be, Mr. Burgoyne is a man of his word; he certainly keeps his promise to Elizabeth that Byng shall be well nursed. He keeps his other promise, too--though that is more by good luck than good management--that Byng shall not die. Whether to hinder his friend from being made a liar, or because he himself is loth to leave a world which he has found so pretty, cruel, and amusing, Byng does not die--Byng lives. By her 25th day February has dried her tears, though they still hang on her green lashes, and a great galleon of a sun steers through a tremendous sea of blue, as Jim persuades Byng's mother to go out for her first delicious drive in that fresh and satin-soft air of the Algerian February, which matches our best poets' May. He takes her along the Route des Aqueduques, that lovely route which runs high along the hillside among the villas above the town, so high as to be on a level with the roofs of the lofty-standing Continental and Orient Hotels. It is a most twisting road, which in curves and loops winds about the head of narrow deep gorges, full of pale olive-trees, caroubiers, and ilex. Below lies the red-roofed white town. Slowly they trot past the campagne of the "English Milor," "L'Epicier Anglais," and many others, over whose high walls bougainvillias light their now waning purple fires, and big bushes of fleurs de Marie stoop their milky stars. Mrs. Byng's eyes, sunk and diminished by watching and weariness, have been lying restfully on the delightful spring spectacle--on the great yellow sorrels by the wayside; she now turns them tear-brimmed to her companion. "I could jump out of my skin!" she says shakily. "What a sun! what a sea! And to think that, after all, we have pulled him through."