And it was a fighting case. Innumerable nights followed, all alike. The temperature rose and fell a little, only to rise again; the pulse strengthened and weakened by turns; delirium continued unbroken. As night after night wore on and no fresh sign of internal injury developed, the girl found herself forgetting the immediate condition of the patient and going back to the thing that had brought him here. If she was right and he was possessed by a fixed idea, the dread of some concrete thing or experience, his delirium showed no evidence. It seemed more the delirium of exhaustion than fever, and there was no raving. Consciousness, however, might reveal what delirium hid, so, as the nights slipped monotonously by, the girl found herself waiting with a growing eagerness for the man to come back to himself. The waiting seemed interminable, but a time came at last when Sheila slipped through the door of No. 3 and found a pair of deep-set, haunting eyes turned full upon her. "It's--it's Leerie." The words came with some difficulty, but there was an untold relief in Peter's voice. For a moment the girl was taken aback, but only for a moment. She laughed him a friendly little laugh while she put her hand down to the hand that was still too weak to reach out in greeting. "Yes. Oh yes, it's Leerie. Been getting pretty well acquainted with you these weeks, but rather a surprise to find it so--so mutual." "I got acquainted with you--beforehand," announced Peter. "I see--omnibus, Hennessy, and the swans." She laughed again softly. "You've been away a long time; hope you're glad to get back." Peter reflected. "I'm afraid I'm not. But I'll not say it if it sounds too much like a quitter." "No, say it and get it out of your system. Getting well always seems a terrible undertaking; and the stronger you've been the harder it seems." Sheila turned to her chart and preparations for the night. Lights out, she sat down by the open window to wait for Peter to sleep. An hour passed, two hours, and sleep did not come. She fed him hot milk and he still lay open-eyed, almost rigid, staring straight at the ceiling. At midnight she stole out for her own supper in the diet-kitchen and found him still awake when she returned, the haunting eyes looking more child's than man's in the dimness of the night lamp. Had she been free to follow her most vagrant impulse, she would have climbed on the head of the bed, taken the bandaged head on her lap, and plunged into the most enthralling tale of boy adventure her imagination could compass. But she hounded off the impulse, after the fashion of treating all vagrants, and went back to the window to wait and wonder. Peter was still awake when the gray of the morning crept down the corridors of the Surgical. Sheila questioned Tyler, the day nurse, as she came off duty the next evening, "Number Three sleep any to boast of?" "Why, no! Didn't he sleep well last night?"