And at last the patient began to get better. The seizure had been a very bad one, but he mended, and was at last able to be removed. He was too confused even then to know what was being done for him, or to realise the state into which his work must have got but for the strenuous and anxious deputyship of his clerk. He was taken away even without knowing, without being able to say a word to Harry. But Rita, who had so tortured him, who even in the midst of her watch had heard without knowing it how Harry had taken her father’s place, and how he had made himself the servant of the house, did not leave him without a token of her gratitude. One day, while he was sitting absorbed in business, but not able to keep himself from thinking now and then wistfully whether he should see either of them before they went away, there came a soft little knock at the door of communication by which the Vice-Consul had introduced him first into his house. Harry was at Mr. Bonamy’s own table, taking his place, and feeling himself already so much at home in the work that the appeals which he had dreaded at first no longer affected him. But when he heard this knock his whole frame quivered. He did not know what to expect. He got up trembling from his chair, and opened the door. In the passage stood Rita, very worn and pale, with dark lines round the eyes that seemed to fill up all her face. She had scarcely left her father’s bedside, he had heard, watching over him night and day. Her slight little figure, always so slim and girlish, seemed to have shrunk to nothing. There was not a trace of colour in her face. “Miss Bonamy!” he said, with a sharp tone of surprise, though he was not surprised; the moment he had heard the knock he had been aware that Rita, and no other, must have made that appeal. The touch on the door had conveyed a plaintive sound to him like her voice. She smiled, but did not say anything. Her eyes filled suddenly with tears, and the soft lines of her mouth quivered. She came into the office, where he stood gazing at her, and held out to him both her hands, smiling up in his face like a child. “I have come to thank you,” she said, at last, the two big tears dropping like drops of rain in a thunder shower, “for all your--kindness.” She paused a little before that last word, and through the tears, through the angelical, pathetic smile, which wrung poor Harry’s heart, there came something that was like a ghost of mischief. She remembered their last conversation, though so much had happened since, and could not refrain, though her heart was moved to its depths, from throwing this ghost of a malicious shaft at him. Somehow the effect upon Harry was of a different kind from before. Perhaps he felt that he had now a standing-ground which no one could undervalue or take from him. At all events he kept her hands in his, and looked at her with a gaze under which her eyes swerved. “It was not kindness,” he said.