How delightful it was to have her dear caresses again--to feel her soft breath on his faded cheek; all seemed so new, so strange, that he almost feared the delicious spell might break, and he, awaking, find himself again in his grass hut at Korti, or gliding down the Nile in the whaleboat of the old Staffordshire, with Arabs to repel, rocks to avoid, and cataracts to shoot with oar and pole. 'Oh, Jack,' said Maude, for the twentieth time, 'forgive and pardon me for doubting you; but that woman----' 'A vile plot--backed up by a forged letter! My little Maude, it would not have borne a moment's investigation!' 'I know--I know now; but I was so terrified--so crushed--so lonely! And then, think of the days and nights of horror and agony I underwent. The woman dying of a street accident in the Infirmary of Edinburgh, signed a confession of her story--that she was the bribed agent of Sharpe's plot. I wrote all about it, but you never got my letter.' 'And this was "the startling news" that made you so suddenly leave Edinburgh?' 'To come here in search of you. Oh, Jack! I was mad to doubt you; but you would quite pardon me if you knew all I have undergone. Shall I ever forget the night she came--the night of that aimless flight south--aimless, save to avoid you--but ending at York? Oh never, Jack, if I lived a thousand years! I now know that it takes a great deal to kill some people; yet I think that, but for dear, affectionate Hester, I could not have lived very long with that awful and never-ceasing pain gnawing at my heart.' Jack raised her quivering face between his tremulous hands, and looked into it fondly and yearningly. How full of affection it seemed--so softly radiant with shy and lovely blushes, while her eyes of forget-me-not blue never, even in the past, shone with the love-light that illumined them now, when sufferings were past and their memory becoming fainter. 'How long--how long it seems since we separated, and without a farewell, Jack!' 'A day sometimes seems an age--ay, even a day, when matters of the heart are concerned.' 'And a minute or two may undo the work of years--yea, of a lifetime. But you must get well and strong, Jack, for the homeward voyage. In a few days we shall have you laughing among us again; and you will see what a careful little nurse I shall prove.' Jack, withal, feared just then that there was but little laughter left for him on earth; yet their reunion and the presence of Maude acted as a wonderful charm upon him, and from her loving little hands, instead of those of a stolid hospital orderly, he now took his prescribed 'baby food' as he called it--beef-tea, eggs beat up in milk, and port wine elixir, with the odious 'diluted hydrochloric acid, one drachm, and of quinine, eight drachms,' as ordered by the medical staff.