“Let him sleep; it will do him good and keep back the dreadful vomit,” Christine had said, and not for worlds would Queenie disobey her. She held a human life in her keeping, and with her finger on her lip to Pierre, who crouched almost at her feet, she seated herself in an arm-chair just where she could see the outline of the figure upon the bed, and there for hours she sat and watched, and listened to the irregular breathing, while every kind of wild fancy danced through her brain, and her limbs began at last to feel prickly and numb, and a sense of cold and faintness to steal over her. The air in the room was hot and oppressive though the windows were opened wide. Outside, the rain was falling heavily, and the sky as black as ink; there was no sound to break the awful stillness, except the occasional tread of some physician or nurse on duty, or the crash of distant wheels, whose meaning Queenie understood full well, shuddering as she thought of the rapid burials which the peril made necessary, and remembering what she had read of the great plague in London, where the death-cart rolled nightly through the street, while the dreadful cry was heard: “Bring out your dead; bring out your dead.” The words kept repeating themselves over and over in Queenie’s mind until her brain became confused; the present faded away into the far-off past, and she was one of those weary watchers in London, listening to the cry: “Bring out your dead.” And she was bringing hers—was carrying the young man whose long limbs dragged upon the floor, and whose head drooped upon her shoulder, while his dead face, not yet cold, touched hers with a caressing motion which brought with it a thought of poor Phil, lying beneath the Indian waters. It was a horrid nightmare, and Queenie struggled with it a moment, and then awoke with a cry of Phil upon her lips—a cry so loud that the sleeper upon the bed started a little, and moaned, and said something indistinctly, and moved uneasily, then settled again into slumber, and all was quiet as ever. But Queenie stood erect upon her feet, rigid as a piece of marble, and almost as white, while her eyes, which seemed to Pierre to shoot out gleams of fire, were turned wildly toward the form lying so motionless across the room, with the white, shapely hand still outside the counterpane, and the light brown wavy hair upon the pillow. He had spoken—had called a name, which the excited girl had recognized as her own. She could _not_ be mistaken. In answer to her cry for _Phil_ the fever patient had aroused a little and responded: “Queenie.” She was sure of it. He might not have meant _her_, it is true. There were other Queenies in the world, no doubt, but he had called her name—this man, who in her dream she was carrying to the death-cart, and who might perhaps, go there when the morning dawned.