The days went slowly, slowly on, and Mr Dupuy and Harry Noel both continued to recover steadily from their severe injuries. Marian came over every day to help with the nursing, and took charge for the most part, with Aunt Clemmy’s aid, of the young Englishman; while Nora’s time was chiefly taken up in attending to her father’s manifold necessities. Still at odd moments she did venture to help a little in taking care of poor Harry, whose gratitude for all her small attentions was absolutely unbounded, and very touching. True, she came comparatively seldom into the sickroom (for such in fact it was, the crushing blow on Harry’s head having been followed by violent symptoms of internal injury to the brain, which made his case far more serious in the end than Mr Dupuy’s); but whenever he woke up after a short doze, in his intervals of pain, he always found a fresh passion-flower, or a sweet white rosebud, or a graceful spray of clambering Martinique clematis, carefully placed in a tiny vase with pure water on the little table by the bedside; and he knew well whose dainty fingers had picked the pretty blossoms and arranged them so deftly, with their delicate background of lace-like wild West Indian maiden-hair, in the tiny bouquets. More than once, too, when Aunt Clemmy wasn’t looking, he took the white rosebuds out of the water for a single moment and gazed at them tenderly with a wistful eye; and when, one afternoon, Marian surprised him in the very act, as she came in with his regulation cup of chicken-broth at the half-hour, she saw that the colour rushed suddenly even into his brown and bloodless cheek, and his eyes fell like a boy’s as he replaced the buds with a guilty look in the vase beside him. But she said nothing about the matter at the time, only reserving it for Nora’s private delectation in the little boudoir half an hour later.