So Oliver was regularly installed, with the doctor’s consent, night-nurse to Jack Dadd; and in place of calling at the Meadows, he went out of the way to avoid the house and any chance of encountering Mrs. Hilliard or her cousin, as he passed backwards and forwards between the rooms above the shop in the High Street, Friarton, and Friarton Mill for a considerable number of mornings and evenings. Such fellow-townsmen as he met contented themselves with looking curiously after him, whether they stopped him to enquire for the sick man, or whether they crossed the street to shun the lightest breath of infection. An odd fish, Oliver Constable, not without feeling—strange to say—in his queer composition. CHAPTER XXX. STUMBLED ACROSS—INTERVIEWED—TAKEN AT HIS WORD. One night, before it was late, as Oliver was stooping over Jack, trying to ascertain whether he were really muttering irrelevantly, ‘There’s Ruby, and Rover, and Ranter, too,’ or asking for something the sufferer wanted, a man’s figure in professional black, which was yet not the doctor’s, appeared on the opposite side of the bed. Oliver looked up—it was Mr. Holland, the Dadds’ and Oliver’s minister. He had not been there before—partly because he had been away on sick leave, partly because he had returned, only half recruited, after the anxiously economised weeks at the sea-side with his family—difficult for the poor minister to afford in more ways than one. And his wife had so implored him not to put his shaken health and strength, not fairly reestablished, to the severe test of a fever-laden atmosphere, that he had yielded reluctantly, and kept away from the unconscious Jack and his burdened father and mother, till Mr. Holland could do so no longer. Come what might of it, though it should cost him his own life, and his wife should be left a widow and his children fatherless, the pastor must be at his post; and when he went to it, he found the rebel of his congregation hanging over the sick man—indifferent to inhaling the tainted vapours at the fountain-head. Mr. Holland coloured high and hesitated. Oliver looked up and spoke without the slightest difficulty, rather with a roughish freedom, born of the necessity of the moment. ‘Hallo, sir! are you there? Look here, Holland; from the colour of your coat, you have seen more sickness than I. Can you feel a pulse? Can you pronounce on the state of a tongue? You come as a stranger, you can tell how Jack strikes you. What do you think of his chance?’ Mr. Holland stepped forward and did as he was required. Oliver and he consulted together and watched and nursed Jack, without a thought of anybody besides, for some hours. Then, after the clergyman had taken up his hat to go, he hesitated once more, put it down again, and touched Oliver’s arm with a hand that shook slightly.