His face softened wonderfully. "Ah!--Yes. It is worse when you care, my dear; but all the more reason for helping. Come, I have no one else. You shall keep me from hurting him by holding this little cone over his face--see, how simple. He will certainly groan, and you will certainly bear it. Come, then!" Jacqueline, sick and shivering, stuck to her post. "If Jemmy could only see me now!" was the thought with which she stiffened herself. She tried not to listen to the moaning voice--"They're killing me! Take it away. Oh, _don't_ hurt me any more--" "You said it wouldn't hurt him!" she muttered once, fiercely. "And it does not--only his imagination. He has a vivid imagination, this chap." "Of course he has!" She scented disrespect, and was quick to resent it. "He's a very famous author,--Mr. Percival Channing." "So?" But the school-teacher did not appear to be greatly impressed. "A healthy-looking author, at least, which is in his favor. This should not give him any trouble.--Aha! Now we have it." He held up the bullet for her to see. "Now then," he added in a moment, "you shall go into my little guest-room there while I watch over our patient, and sleep like the heroine you are for many hours." Jacqueline demurred indignantly. "Leave him? Indeed I won't! It's my place to nurse him, not yours. Go to sleep yourself!" He did not venture to drive Woman out of her natural sphere. "As you like. Just rest on one of these cots, then, while I attend to some further matters. I shall rouse you when I am ready to leave." "You won't go far?" "Oh, no. I shall be within call." Jacqueline stretched herself luxuriously. The cot was very comfortable. "I shan't go to sleep, of course," she said.... Once during the night she stirred suddenly. "Philip will be worried," she murmured. A quiet voice answered beside her, "No, I shall send word to him." She lifted her heavy lids. "Oh, is that you, Phil?" she muttered contentedly, and dozed off again.... It was not such an odd mistake. The school-teacher, sitting there beside her, had taken off his spectacles, and the eyes she met when hers opened, were eyes she had known and trusted all her life; gleaming, kindly, quizzical eyes, astonishingly blue by contrast with a dark face. He tried not to cough for fear of disturbing her. Until dawn and afterwards he sat there between the two beds, sometimes rising quietly to minister to Channing's needs, but for the most part gazing at the sleeping girl, hungrily, wistfully, often through a mist of tears; searching for resemblances, and finding them. "Her child!" he whispered to himself. "Her little girl, the babe that was on her breast!--So like, and yet unlike. A hint of pliancy here, of weakness perhaps, that is not Kate. Wilfulness with Kate, never weakness--And already a woman, already come to the time of sacrifice. Her little girl!--"