"He used to be very nice when I knew him; but, then, sick people are always nice; they are so much at one's mercy," said the little lady, airily. They were, in their way, admirable types of their kind, these two women; both artificial, yet with an artificiality which sprang from the head in the one case, from the heart in the other; for Mrs. Vane saw through herself, and Lady George did not. "So that is Paul's sister," said the former to herself as, on the way back to her lounge, after escorting her visitor in friendliest fashion to the stairs, she paused to take up a photograph case lying on the table. It contained Paul's portrait as he had been before the time when she had watched his fair head tossing restlessly on the pillow in that hot Indian room which nothing would cool. The memory of those dreary days and nights came back to her in a rush, making her, paradoxically, look years older, worn, haggard, and anxious. She seemed to be back in them; to hear the gathering cry of the jackals prowling past the open door, to see the flicker of the oil night-light gleam on the splintered ice, turning it for a brief second to diamonds, as she prepared it for the burning forehead above those bright, yet glazed eyes; and, more than all, she seemed to feel the old passionate protest against the possibility of his passing for ever out of her life joined to the fierce determination to save him to the uttermost. From what? from herself, perhaps. For Mrs. Vane had performed the most unselfish act of her life when she had laughed and scoffed at the devotion and gratitude of her patient. She had had many, she said, and they had always felt like that during some period of their convalescence. There was nothing for these sequelæ of jungle fever like three months' leave to the bears in Kashmir; and, if he liked, he might bring her home one of those little silk carpets for her sitting-room as a fee; she would prefer a carpet to anything else. And so Paul had come back with his unromantic offering, cured, as she had prophesied, of his feverishness, but not of his friendliness. That had lasted, despite a separation of years. And something else had lasted also, to judge by the look on Mrs. Vane's face as she stood with Paul's photograph in her hand. Lady George Temple took a cab home, and tried to regain a sense of lost importance by having the children down to tea. Paul had kept this thing secret from her; he had allowed her for years to speak kindly, effusively of the woman who had saved his life as if she were an old frump, when she was really--Blanche, being a person of sense, felt forced to acknowledge the truth--one of the most charming little creatures imaginable, with just that half-sympathetic, half-bantering manner which was so taking. And Paul, having done this, her own rôle of devoted sisterhood suffered thereby; so she fell back upon her motherhood.