The man returned with the farmer's cart, and Peter was taken to the house. A telegram was sent to Hamingburgh, and the local doctor was called. He said that Peter had had a stroke of the sun. He was in a raging fever. The farmer's granddaughter was occasionally left with him. She sat for several hours beside the bed watching Peter's restless and feeble movements. Sometimes she heard him talking vaguely and softly, but for long she could catch no syllable of what he said. Again she was stirred with delicious pity. She put her hands upon his cheeks, and leaned over his stirring lips for a long hour. Then suddenly she began to hear what he was saying, piecing his broken words. He was walking alone in a dark house. It was very dark and quite still except for the dripping of water into a cistern. Peter always returned to this dripping water. He was looking for someone, and he stood where she used to sleep. At last a strange name came to his tongue--endlessly repeated. The listening girl drew away from him. She went to the window to get beyond range of his voice. She was empty and thwarted. The name pursued her and she turned back to the bed. Maddened by his repeated murmur, she felt as if she were fighting for a place in his mind. She put her hand upon his mouth, trying to still the name upon his lips. But she felt them moving under the touch of her fingers, with the syllables that shut her out. She dropped on her knees beside him, becoming a part of his madness. "Here is the woman you want," she sang to him. Tears of vexation and jealousy--quick as a child's--started down her face. "Peter, boy, don't you remember? You came to me, and dropped in the hay. I sang to you in the dark, and you came." But Peter stood in a dark house, muttering a name she had never heard. Now he was striking matches one after another, peering into the empty corners of a deserted room. Then he spoke of an attic with rafters, and again of the dripping water. The girl looked into his vacant eyes. "Can't you see me, Peter?" It was someone else he saw: he talked now of her dusty frock and of a garden where he sat and waited. The woman by the bed could not come between him and this lovely ghost. She strained Peter towards her, and put her face to his cheek. "No, Peter; it's me that is here. Can't you feel that I am holding you?" Her pressure started in him another disordered memory. He struggled against her, and raised himself upon an elbow. His eyes looked quite through her. He saw her in his brain, but he did not see her in the room before him. The girl shuddered to hear him struggling with a mirage of herself. He was back in the loft. At first she thought it was the sight of her visibly before him in the room that caused him to speak of her. She drew back, and with a shudder saw he was talking to the air. "You are not Miranda," he said, accusing the shape of his brain. "She smiled, but she did not smile like that."