Before another week was over the fresh cases of typhoid had ceased. During the three days immediately following the thunder-storm rain had fallen again and again, heavily and all night long. By day the same liquid autumn weather had stretched its length of sunlit creamy hours as the morning on which Jeannie had watched the sunrise over the cleaned earth, but every evening at sunset the thick, desired clouds came trooping out of the south-west, and made night full of the noise of rain. The wells, swiftly fed by the spongy chalk, had filled, the foul water of the polluted springs was no longer drawn on, and the gorging microbe, with its holocaust of victims, Jeannie’s fiend of the garden-scene, found none to drink from his shrine. The first cases which had occurred were hardly out of the doctor’s hands before the epidemic ceased, as suddenly as it had begun, but there was now no lack but rather a plethora of nurses, for typhoid is the nurses’ favourite disease, since in it each case depends so entirely on them, and nothing is dearer to the skilled than responsibility. This being the case, both Jeannie and Miss Fortescue had, in the fourth week since the epidemic began, given up their places at the hospital. Regular trained nurses were there in abundance, and there was no longer need for them. But to both the sacrifice of giving up their work was far greater than the original risk of taking it up. For several weeks certainly their lives had centred on one thing, the victory over the microbe, and to think only of one thing, even for three weeks of a life, wears a rut in it, and a jolt is necessitated by passing out of the rut. Jeannie, after the momentous midnight talk with her aunt, had not been encouraged to allude to the subject again, nor had she wished it. That curious flood of confidence had passed by in spate, like the thunder-storm that had raged simultaneously outside, and, like the sediment of gravel which the storm had made on the grass, there lingered in Miss Fortescue’s manner a conscious and expressed reminiscence of what had passed between them. An added tenderness in little things was there, hard to define, but impossible not to appreciate. Both of them, moreover, had something of that quality which is supposed to be confined to the sterner sex, who, when greatly moved, say, “Good-night, old chap,” and all is said. This fortnight of deluged nights had brought about its natural consequences. The inimitable baby was to return to Wroxton, and, as was quite natural, Jack Collingwood was going to accompany it and its nurse in their hazardous forty-mile journey from town. The day had been fixed for its return, and the arrival, though the train was not certainly known, might be expected about Monday. So Jeannie, at first contrary to Miss Fortescue’s expectation, but on second thoughts conformably to them, went out for a walk about eleven, and said no word about meeting them at the station.