The truth is that, what he had done for her when she was plague-stricken, she had now done for him. By unremitting care of him in the endless hours of his delirium, reckless of how she exhausted herself in the effort, she had brought him safely through the Valley of the Shadow, and already, even as he spoke of dying, deluded by his weakness and the great lassitude that attends exhaustion into believing that already he stood upon the threshold, his recovery was assured. Within less than a week he was afoot, regaining strength, and pronounced clear of the infection. Yet, before they would suffer him to depart into the world again, he must undergo the period of sequestration that the law prescribed, so as to ensure against his conveying the infection to others. For this he was to be removed from the pest-house to a neighbouring abode of rest and convalescence. When the hour of departure came, he went to take his leave of Nancy. She awaited him on the lawn under the tall old cedars of Lebanon that graced the garden of this farm which had been converted to the purposes of a hospital. Slimly graceful she stood before him, whilst in a voice, which he laboured to keep steady, he uttered words of an irrevocable farewell. It was very far from what she had been expecting, as he might have read in the pale dismay that overspread her countenance. There was a stone seat near at hand there in the shade, and she sank limply down upon this whilst he stood beside her awaiting her dismissal. He was very plainly clad, in garments which she had secretly caused to be procured for him, but which he supposed to be the parting gift of the charitable pest-house authorities. She controlled herself to ask him steadily: “What are you going to do? Where shall you go when ... when the month is past?” He smiled and shrugged a little. “I have not yet considered fully,” he answered her in actual words, whilst his tone conveyed that he had neither thought nor care of what might follow. Fortune, it might be said, had been kind to him; for Fortune had given him back his life when it was all but lost. But it was the way of Fortune to fool him with gifts when he could no longer profitably use them. “It may be,” he added, answering the round stare of her eyes, “that I shall go to France. There is usually work for a soldier there.” She lowered her glance, and for a long moment there was silence. Then she spoke again, calmly, almost formally, marshalling the points of an argument that she had well considered. “You remember that day when we talked, you and I, in that house in Knight Ryder Street, just after my recovery? When I would have thanked you for my life, you rejected my thanks as you rejected the forgiveness that I offered. You rejected it, persuaded that I was moved only by gratitude for the life you had saved; that I sought by that forgiveness to discharge the debt in which you had placed me.” “It was so,” he said, “and it is so. It cannot be otherwise.”