“You might--in time,” said the doctor, with a smile, “but not just for as long as the fire lasted; unless you had taken cold, which you don’t appear to have done, better luck.” “But there was no other danger?” “You could not have been burnt alive with the engines playing on you,” said the doctor. “Yes, of course there was danger: the roof might have fallen in, which it did not--thanks, I believe, to your promptitude; or even if the partition had come down upon you, it would have been far from pleasant; but I should think you have had quite enough of it as it is.” “I want to make sure,” said the patient, with incomprehensible eagerness, “not for my own sake--but--there never was any real danger? you can tell me that.” “One can never say as much,” was the answer. “I should not myself like to lie insensible in a burning house, close to a partition which fell eventually. At the least you might have been crippled and disfigured for life.” A groan burst from John’s breast when he found himself alone on that weary lingering night. How long it seemed!--years almost since the excitement of the fire which had sustained him for the moment, though he was not aware of it. He put his hand up to his eyes, and found that there were tears in them, and despised himself, which added another thorn to his pillow. He had nobody to console him; nobody to keep him from brooding over the sudden misery. Was it a fit revenge of fate upon him for his feeling of right in regard to Kate? He had felt that he had a right to her because he had saved her life. Was it possible that he had taken an ungenerous advantage of that? He went back over the whole matter, and he said to himself that, had he loved a girl so much out of his sphere, without this claim upon her, he would have smothered his love, and made up his mind from the beginning that it was useless. But the sense that he had saved her life had given him a sense of power--yes, of ungenerous power--over her. And now he himself had fallen into the same subjection. Another man had saved his life; or, at least, was supposed by others, and no doubt would himself believe that he had done so. Fred Huntley, whom she had taken into her confidence, to whom she had described the state of the affairs between them, whose advice almost she had asked on a matter which never should have been breathed to profane ears--Fred Huntley had saved his life. He groaned in his solitude, and put up his hand to his eyes, and despised himself. “I had better cry over it, like a sick baby,” he said to himself, with savage irony; and oh to think that was all, all he could do!