“Not now. You are too sick for that. You might give her the fever,” his mother interposed, while Elithe kept from his sight as far as possible. He missed her at once and said: “If she can’t kiss me, she can hold my hand. Where is she?” Elithe returned to her post and held his hot hands and bathed his head and answered to the name Clarice and felt her heart throb strangely at the terms of endearment he gave her, asking her often if she loved him. Her silence troubled him greatly, and he would look reproachfully at her, repeating the question, until once, when they were alone and he was very persistent, she leaned forwards and said in a whisper, while her cheeks were scarlet: “Yes, Paul, I love you. Don’t ask me again, or talk of me so much.” “All right. I won’t,” he answered cheerfully, and soon fell into a sleep which did him so much good that from that time onward he began to mend. “Will he remember?” Elithe asked herself in an agony of fear and shame as his brain began to clear and to realize where he was and why he was there. He did not remember, nor did he mention Clarice again for some time, except to ask if she had been there. “I thought she was here once. It must have been a dream,” he said to Elithe,—adding after a moment, “I believe I knew you were here all the time,—you and Sherry,” and he stroked the head of the dog, sitting on his haunches beside him and looking at him with almost human intelligence in his eyes. He did not talk much now, except occasionally with his father of the future, which was so dark and full of peril. “They have stopped looking for me, you think?” he would say: “but what of that? I can’t stay here forever. If I don’t give myself up again, what am I to do?” This question was hard to answer, and, as the days went by and Paul grew stronger and realized his real position, he grew more and more restless and unhappy,—with a desire to see Clarice and talk with her of what he ought to do. Nearly every visitor had left Oak City except the Percys, who had been kept there by the continued indisposition of Clarice. Paul had heard that she was going on the morrow and he begged so hard to see her that his father finally consented, and Elithe was asked to take a note from him and explain. Clarice had passed from nervous prostration into a kind of stony apathy and indifference to everything around her. When she heard of Paul’s escape she was glad, and gladder still when told that people believed he had managed to reach the mainland and was probably a thousand miles away. She hoped he would not be recaptured, as the disgrace for herself would be less than if he were convicted and punished. Mrs. Percy did not quite see the distinction, but Clarice did. “If the man I was to have married should be hung, or sent to prison, I could never hold up my head again. It’s bad enough that he should have killed Jack and been tried for his life,” she said, losing sight of Paul’s unhappy position, and thinking only of her own.