Ruth, thinking the summons important, yielded her place for a moment, intending to return within a very few moments, but no sooner had old Mage assumed charge of the patient than she began to devise ways and means by which she hoped to prolong the stay of her dear young lady, for it seemed to her to be too much for her to bear ... to care for her recreant husband under all the trying circumstances. The first thing that the new nurse did would have been severely criticized by the head surgeon had his attention not been fully occupied in another part of the large room; to begin with, instead of smoothing back the dark hair from the man's forehead as it would seem to one observing her from the rear she was doing, she very deliberately pulled the handful of curls she was clutching, hoping to make him open his eyes so that she could continue her scrutiny of him in order to be as certain as possible of his suspected identity; this ruse succeeded, for Manuello's large, dark brown eyes flew open and were fixed in horror on the face bending over him; it was quite a different countenance than the one he had last seen beside him, for old Mage never had been a beauty and the loss of her teeth had not added to her appearance while the ferocity of her glance was accentuated by the multitude of criss-cross wrinkles which surrounded the light blue eyes out of which she was glaring at him; the words she hissed in his ear added to the confusion under which the helpless man was laboring: "I thought that you were dead and buried out of sight ... you hateful, low-lived pup! How dare you be brought into her place, now? If I did just right, I do believe I'd choke the life out of you while you can't fight back! The girl's here, too ... you must be a devil in human form! You ought to be burning in hell!" The object that had led old Mage to make this attack upon the wounded man was about to be accomplished, for, with a wild scream, he vaulted over the foot of the little cot and bounded through the open doorway as if he were pursued by demons; his temporary nurse did not try to prevent his exit which was what she had longed to bring about, although the manner of his going startled even her, as she had no idea of the effect that her hasty words would have upon the guilty spirit of the man whose crimes, it seemed to him, had found him out; the new wound he had that day received, was not of a nature to impede his progress for a short distance, and he almost instantly disappeared from among the nurses and surgeons; his wild expression so impressed all whom he met before he reached the outskirts of the hospital grounds that he was again a fugitive, hunted, this time, by both friends and enemies. As Ruth was about to return to her patient, for she could find no immediate need of her presence elsewhere, she met an excited nurse who told her of having seen an excessively active young man flying out into the open, clad only in hospital garb.