When John Garnet recovered his senses he thought he must be dreaming, so like a trick of Fancy was the scene to which he awoke. Above him hung heavy bed-curtains of a rich brocade, under his head was a laced pillow, and he lay on a scarlet coverlet bound with a border of blue. His eyes, travelling lazily round the room, rested on a silver lamp, fed by some aromatic oil; and when he closed them again, wearied by the exertion, gentle hands pressed a cordial to his lips, and a consoling voice whispered in his ear: "Courage, my young friend. Do not attempt to raise your head. Another sip, Waif. Good. In five minutes he will come-to." In five minutes he _did_ come to, and found strength to ask what had happened and where he was? "The first question you must answer for yourself," said the grave old man who sat by his bedside, with a finger on his pulse. "To the second I reply, make your mind easy, you are in the house and under the care of the celebrated Doctor Katerfelto, who has won more games of skill against death than any practitioner now alive. Waif, bring me the roll of lint that stands on the top shelf in the surgery. Look in the middle drawer for some red salve, and put that flask out of my patient's reach." The girl had left the room, and was back again quicker than John Garnet's languid senses could follow her movements. When she returned with these simple remedies, he did not fail to mark the softness of her dark eyes, the subdued grace of her bearing, the sweet and loving pity that seemed to pervade her whole being while she hovered about his couch, and administered skilfully to the wants of a wounded man. Nor was this tenderness, this sympathy, this almost maternal solicitude, in accordance with her general habits, in keeping with her type of form and feature. She looked more like a panther of the wilderness than the nurse in a sick room. The lithe and supple frame, the light and noiseless gait, the quick stealthy turn of ear and eye and limb, ready on the instant for attack, defence, or flight, all this partook of the fierce, feline nature, and all this she inherited from that mysterious race to which she belonged, whose origin history has failed to discover, whose destiny conjecture is at a loss to guess. From her gipsy ancestors she derived her tameless glances, her nimble strength, her shapely limbs with their delicate extremities, her swarthy savage beauty and light untiring step. From them, too, came the wild blood that boiled under restraint or contradiction, the unbridled passions that knew no curb of custom nor of conscience, the cunning that could conceal them till occasion offered, the recklessness that would then indulge them freely without pity or remorse.