"He told me, I repeat, that you must be kept perfectly quiet, father, and I must insist upon your now trying to help me by following out his wishes." "A cripple--a helpless cripple," said the injured man, without paying the slightest heed to his son's words, but speaking as if to someone he could see across the room. "I did not want telling that. A man knows. But what does it mean? Wreck? Utter helplessness? Being led about by the hand? No, no, no; not so bad as that. The brain is right. I am strong there. You boys are not going to usurp everything yet. Do you hear? I say you boys are--you boys--I say--the doctor--quick--the doctor--ah!" His eyes glared wildly as the fit of excitement rapidly increased, till he almost raved like one in a fit of delirium, and every attempt to calm him by word or action on the part of his son only seemed to intensify his excitement, till a sudden spasm made his face twitch, and his head fell back with the angry light dying out of his eyes. "Quick!" whispered Neil. "Run up to my room and bring down the little case on the drawers." He raised his father's head as he spoke, and, after glancing at him in a frightened manner, Alison hurried out of the room. An hour later Ralph Elthorne was lying perfectly insensible, with his son watching by his bedside. It was no new, thing to him this tending of a patient in a serious strait consequent upon an accident, but their relative positions robbed him of his customary _sang-froid_, and again and again he asked himself whether he had not done wrong in accepting so onerous a task, and whether Sir Denton had not placed too much confidence in his knowledge of the treatment such a case demanded. When such thoughts mastered him he was ready over and over again to send a fresh message to the great surgeon, and it was only by a strong effort that he mastered himself and maintained his calmness. For he knew in an ordinary way a doubt of his capacity would never enter his head; all he had to do, he told himself, was to strive as he would have striven for another. "But he is my father," he muttered, "and it is so hard to feel confidence when one knows that the patient mistrusts every word and act." CHAPTER SIX. WATCHING THE SUFFERER. "What are you going to do about sitting up?" said Alison in a whisper about eleven o'clock that night. "He must not be left." "Certainly not," said Neil, after a glance at the bed where his father lay sleeping uneasily. "I am going to sit with him." "That will not do," said Alison quietly. "_You_ are the doctor, and must be rested and ready when wanted. You had better go to bed and I'll sit up. Aunt Anne wants to, and so does Isabel, but the old lady is hysterical and fit for nothing, and Isabel is too young." "Of course," said Neil quietly. "But I have settled all that. I shall sit up, and if there is any need I can call you directly."