The bravery of a plain fireman mattered not, I thought. They must save lives as a business; chums, friends, they may slink away and leave you to a horrible death. Jim Hosley was all that Tescheron had painted him, and yet there were doubts in my mind. But these doubts were soon removed. CHAPTER VII For nearly five weeks after regaining complete consciousness I lived and gathered strength in that bare and polished room at the hospital. Dust found no place to stick there, it was all so slippery, and the flies were discouraged when they came in and found it so miserably antiseptic. The food was sterilized and peptonized until there was nothing a fly could find in my pre-digested tid-bits to snuggle up to--it was just like licking the plaster off the wall or biting the glazed, enameled paint on the bed. The enameled iron furniture seemed to be made to order without cracks, and there were no tidies or fancy work about. Any insect that came in, slipped around until he figured it was a toboggan slide and a mighty poor place to spend the day. "Please send out for all the newspapers containing accounts of the fire and let me read them," I requested one day soon after my wits improved. "No, indeed; I shall not. Reading is the worst thing you could do," said Hygeia. "You are gaining and must take no risks." So it went. There was no one to obey me. I brooded over my hard luck. But life would have been wholly dismal in such a room without the companionship of one of those inspiring daughters of Hygeia. Now that I am beyond the confines of that room I must confess there seems to be little in life anywhere without one. Bachelors are quickly restored by their antitoxin cheer, but there is a more dangerous bacillus hidden in this powerful living therapeutic agency which in afteryears works its damaging, enervating effect in the heart of a man. They save but to slay! Can there be no healing balm benign in a woman's tender sympathy? Cannot the microbe of remorse be isolated from this serum beautifully administered by melting eyes and graces so fair that we wonder to find them so near our bitterest experiences? But there are wounds that will not heal; some mysterious infection lingers in them to sustain a slow fire, and the ashes of its discontent clog the channels till life seems cast in the vale of death. But no more of this anguish! I have not told her name--in this at least, I shall be wise. I have not told of her family; why she became a daughter of AEsculapius; and beyond those dancing blue eyes, she shall not enter here. Neither shall anything be written of the things that passed between us during those five weeks of my convalescence. What matters it? Was I not in the world simply to be tempered and hardened by all the adversities to which a heart may be subjected? And was I not an inhuman wretch, who touched with the sting of sarcasm, ridicule and scorn the vital things that interest normal beings? To me she became only Hygeia--a goddess!