They laid him there, a pillow under his head, and Beamish returned to his patient’s side. She had sunk back again, but her eyes, looking enormous now in her wasted cheeks, were still upon the figure of Holles where he lay inert as stone, just within the orbit of her vision. “Sleep?” she questioned the doctor, wonderingly. “Is that sleep?” Never had she--nor, indeed, have many--seen slumber fell a man as if he had been shot. “Nothing worse, ma’am. The Colonel has never so much as closed his eyes for a whole week. Nature compassionately has closed them for him. No need to afflict yourself on his behalf. Sleep is all he now requires. So give yourself peace, and beware of making demands upon the little strength that’s left you.” She looked at him intently. “I have the plague, have I not?” “Say rather that you had it, ma’am. You have it no longer. It has been cast out of you. It has left you feeble; but that is all that ails you at present. And you are a safe woman now. When you shall have recovered your strength, you may go whither you will without further fear of the infection. The plague will not touch you again. For the great mercy thus vouchsafed you, you may render thanks to God, and, next to God, to your husband.” She frowned, perplexed. “My husband?” “Your husband, ma’am. And a husband in a thousand--nay, in ten thousand. I have seen many a husband lately, and I speak with knowledge--alas! The terror of the pestilence can blot out every other feeling. I have seen it happen time and again. But Colonel Holles is not of those. His is a devotion that makes a hero of him; and, because he has been fearless, he has been spared. Fortune favours the brave, ma’am.” “But ... but he is not my husband.” “Not your husband?” said the doctor, confounded. And he repeated, “Not your husband!” Then, with an affectation of cynicism very alien in reality to the genial, kindly little man, “Gadso!” he ejaculated, “perhaps that explains it. But what is he, then, who has all but given his life for you?” She hesitated, at a loss how to define their relationship. At last: “Once he was my friend,” she answered. “Once?” The physician raised his bushy brows. “And when, pray, did he cease to be your friend--this man who stayed with you in this infected house when he might have fled; this man who has denied himself sleep or rest of any kind in all these days, that he might be ever at hand against your need of him; this man who has wrestled with death for you, and rescued you at the risk of taking the pestilence a thousand times for your sake?” “Did he do all this?” she asked. Dr. Beamish entertained her with the details of the heroism and self-sacrifice that Holles had displayed. When the tale was done, and she lay silent and very thoughtful, the doctor permitted himself a slyly humorous smile.