Then back to Cap’s hut she hastened, with her small henchman beside her carrying the kettle and the basin; for by this time he, the boy shepherd, began to be interested too, and the vicar’s superintendence was no longer needed. A message of explanation was sent to Embley that Mr. and Mrs. Nightingale might not be anxious, and for several hours Florence gave herself up to nursing her patient. Cap was passive in her hands, and the hot fomentations gradually lessened the pain and the swelling. Imagine the wonder and gratitude of old Roger when he turned up with the rope in his hand and a leaden weight on his poor old heart! Cap, of course, knew his step and greeted him with a little whine of satisfaction, as if to be the first to tell him the good news. “Why, missy, you have been doing wonders,” he said. “I never thought to see t’ poor dog look up at me like that again.” “Yes,” exclaimed the happy young nurse; “doesn’t he look better? Well, Roger, you can throw away the rope. I shall want you to help me make these hot compresses.” “Miss Florence is quite right, Roger,” interposed the vicar; “you’ll soon have Cap running about again.” “I’m sure I cannot thank you and the young lady enough, yer riv’rence. And I’ll mind all the instrooctions for he.” As the faithful dog looked up at him, eased and content, it was a very happy man that was old Roger. But the doctor-nurse was not prepared to lose her occupation too quickly. “I shall come and see him again to-morrow, Roger,” she said; “I know mamma will let me, when I just explain to her about it all.” CHAPTER III. _The weaving of many threads, both of evil and of good._ While Florence Nightingale and her sister were working hard at history and languages and all useful feminine arts, romping in the sunny Hampshire gardens, or riding amongst the Derbyshire hills, the big world outside their quiet paradise was heaping fuel for the fires of war, which at last, when after a quarter of a century it flared up out of its long-prepared combustibles, was “to bring to death a million workmen and soldiers, consume vast wealth, shatter the framework of the European system, and make it hard henceforth for any nation to be safe except by sheer strength.” And above all its devastation, remembered as a part of its undying record, the name of one of these happy children was to be blazoned on the page of history. Already at the beginning of the century the first Napoleon had said that the Czar of Russia was always threatening Constantinople and never taking it, and by the time Florence Nightingale was twelve years old, it might be said of that Czar that while “holding the boundless authority of an Oriental potentate,” his power was supplemented by the far-reaching transmission of his orders across the telegraph wires, and if Kinglake does not exaggerate, “he would touch the bell and kindle a war, without hearing counsel from any living man.”