There were two, one tall and slender, dignified of bearing, yet gracious in every movement; the other short, small, and brisk. They were dressed exactly alike, in the costume of some religious order, as he supposed. They wore long black robes and white linen caps, such as he remembered to have seen worn by the Sisters of Mercy in Breton towns that he had visited years ago in one of his long vacations. Admirable caps for ugly women, for the stiff linen borders projected a quarter of a yard beyond the face, entirely concealed the profile, and overshadowed the countenance at all times. Cyril knew only that the taller of his two nurses had dark eyes and a pale face, and that the little woman had black eyes of exceeding sharpness, that flashed at him from the cavernous cap. They were both admirable nurses, quiet, gentle, attentive, but in some phases of his delirium he hated them, and accused them of all manner of evil designs. They were poisoning him. Yes, the medicine they made him take at stated intervals contained a slow poison--the _Aqua Tofana_ of the Middle Ages--that horrible stuff which the wicked witch Toffania made by wholesale, and sent to all the cities of the earth as the manna of St. Nicola of Bari; or it was the hemlock that Socrates drank, or wolf’s bane, or deadly nightshade. He recognised the flavour of the murderous herb. And then he stormed at his nurses, and told them they had plotted his murder. ‘If you were honest women you would not hide your faces,’ he cried. ‘You are murderesses, and have come here to kill me.’ One night, after an age of fever and hallucination, he sank into a refreshing slumber. It was as if his spirit, newly escaped from a burning hell, had slipped unawares into Paradise. Fair meadows and flowing streams, an ineffable sense of coolness and relief, and then deep rest and stillness. When he awoke, the summer dawn filled the room. Through the widely opened windows came the fresh breezes of the morning. A soft cool hand was on his brow, the tall nurse’s dark figure stood beside his bed. All his delusions, all his hideous fancies, seemed to have run out of his brain, like water out of a sieve, during that one sweet sleep. Suddenly and completely as the leper at the Divine Healer’s bidding, he was made sound and whole. Very weak still, with a sense of utter helplessness and prostration, he yet felt himself cured. The fire that had made life a torture had burnt itself out. He looked up at his nurse. How purely white that quaint old head-gear of hers looked in the morning sunshine. He remembered the bright freshness of just such another morning in his holiday rambles five years ago, and just such another black-robed figure and white cap, a Sister of Mercy waiting for the starting of the diligence, in the old market square at Vannes, the white dusty square, the scanty trees, that seem to have been planted yesterday, the shabby old cathedral looking down at him.