“I think you have decided right,” said Jeannie. “The other child who sleeps in the same room must, of course, be removed at once. You have a spare room? If not, no doubt you could make her a bed here in your dressing-room.” “That would be possible,” said the Colonel. “And since the case is removed,” said Jeannie, “it will no longer be necessary for you to go away. Please don’t trouble to come down, as I can let myself out.” As Jeannie left the house she noticed that the south was black with cloud. The texture of it was different to what it had been during the last fortnight of congested weather. The sky was no longer leaden and dry, but moist and dark with imminent rain. A little wind was beginning to blow in fitful gusts from the same quarter, and leaves nearly dead danced with clouds of whirling dust about the road. Already in the air was the hint of a change; her heart was lighter, for the two hours had been like a caress to her troubled spirit. She had been worn with fruitless effort; the collar of the suffering world chafed her, but one hand brought healing to her, and her heart was holpen. She reported the case of probable typhoid to a doctor, and went back to her ward. Nurse James met her with a smiling face, and when Nurse James smiled it was not without reason. “That girl you left so ill this morning is no worse,” she said. “If anything, she is a little stronger. Dr. Maitland thinks that the sudden drop in the temperature may be after all a sudden turn for the better. He says it occasionally happens. Certainly if there had been perforation we should have known by now. Watch her very carefully.” All the afternoon remote lightning winked distantly in the sky, and the answering thunder got ever gradually louder and more continuous. The wind had veered into the north-west, and was coming in sudden claps and buffets of hot air, and the storm, a distant rack of coppery, hard-edged cloud, distinct and different from the heavy, soft vapours overhead, was approaching slowly from the opposite quarter. The oppression of the air was as intolerable as ever, and strangely more acute, the remote heavens seemed to be pressing down on the earth like a hot lid over a stewing pot. But in the ward there was a general feeling of cheerfulness, easy to perceive, hard to define, a survival doubtless in man of the curious instinct in animals which makes them smell an approaching storm and warns the domestic sort that an earthquake is coming. The earth and the fever-stricken town were waiting for a change, which could not be for the worse. Of them all, only the girl who had been almost despaired of that morning lay quite still and apathetic, and again and again Jeannie went to her bedside betwixt hope and fear.